I prefer to buy organic products as opposed to non-organic products.

“Why?” you might ask. Although the concept of “organic” is an attractive one, it is an expensive diet and lifestyle to uphold. Some people wonder if it really makes that much of a difference.

However, the “expensive” argument is a fair one. It’s true that many organic products are outrageously over-priced and are therefore inaccessible to those working with limited budgets. With only these short-term costs in mind, then sure, how does one justify buying organic? Why spend $5.79 (plus tax) on two litres of organic Lactantia milk when you can spend $2.85 on two litres of Québon?

The thing is, I have learned to think in the long-term. I choose to go organic—not for the sake of making a statement, but because of my own beliefs regarding quality, the environment, and my personal health. In my opinion, these concerns demonstrate how buying organic foods can make a significant difference in one’s diet.

I believe the quality of organic foods is higher than that of non-organic foods. To this day, I still remember when my dad presented me with what I like to call “the strawberry test.” He first asked me to taste a non-organic strawberry. It was a little dry, but a decent strawberry nonetheless. He then asked me to try to the organic strawberry. I was delighted by its intense sweetness and juiciness; it was certainly more satisfying for my palate than the first.

These differences in taste are largely a result of different agricultural practices. For instance, organic fruits and vegetables are often grown in soil containing better micronutrients and genetic diversity. As a result, they are much richer in flavour. I derive a lot more joy from cooking and eating if my food is of a higher quality.

Similar to local farming, organic farming methods have also been proven to be significantly more environmentally sustainable than conventional farming. This is because they use less fossil energy, conserve more water in the soil, and increase the efficiency of energy use per unit of production.

Take the case of livestock. For example, organic, seasonal grazing systems have proven to be more efficient because the animals eat more grass and less grain, leaving more grain available for humans to consume. Organic meat production has also been shown to emit fewer greenhouse gases. Taking into account the numerous environmental challenges our planet is facing today, I feel that I am doing my bit for the earth by eating in a manner than is more eco-conscious and sustainable.

The most notable reason why I eat organic foods is for my own personal health. I feel infinitely more comfortable purchasing products that have not been subject to pesticides, fertilizers, antibiotics, hormones or bioengineering­—the effects of which are transferred to our bodies when we consume those foods.

While organic farming is not completely pesticide or fertilizer-free, the use of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers is strictly limited or forbidden altogether. These limitations on pesticides have positive implications for the nutritional value of the foods in question. Produce grown organically or without pesticides has been proven to contain higher levels of anti-oxidants, vitamins A, C and E, phosphorus, and potassium.

Although a recently published  Stanford study contested these findings and other health benefits of eating organic, I think you’ll always find studies that suit your own preferences. That being said, I like buying organic produce because I think it gives me a better chance of receiving the important nutrients my body requires.  Furthermore, I believe it decreases the amount of harmful chemicals entering my system.

I am most religious about buying organic dairy products, because I know that they were taken from cows that have not been treated with antibiotics or growth hormones to increase milk production. When so many cancers and other illnesses are hormone-dependent. I simply want to avoid having any more hormones in my body than what is natural. The case is similar with meat and eggs.

With these three main concerns in mind, it wasn’t hard for me to cement my commitment to the organic movement. Maybe it’s because I hail from British Columbia, where the prevailing culture is, supposedly, “eat green and love nature.” Geography aside, I do think we have a lot to gain from eating organic, and it is my hope that governments and companies will do more to encourage organic practices.

Today marks the 11th anniversary of the attacks on September 11th, 2001. On that day, I was a fifth grader in downtown Manhattan. I remember that day, and I remember every September 11th after that. Every year, I’m shocked by the strength of my feelings. Every year, I feel the need to say something, though it seems I don’t have anything new to add.

It still jars me to hear ‘September 11th’ being used  as regular date—to mark the due date of a class assignment or an album release. To me, it should be retired and hung up on the rafters next to Patrick Ewing’s jersey in Madison Square Garden.

But I hear it used often enough to think that the rest of the world is beginning to move on. 9/11 is slipping from immediate tragedy backwards into history. In the generations to come, the bottomless pit-in-stomach feeling will be absent from the narratives of the textbooks that record it. It’s impossible to keep this feeling as fresh as it was when the towers fell, when the numbness abated, and the fires finally died out. Its potency will dilute with time, and I think that is good and normal.

This is important, because I understand now what I couldn’t before: to appreciate the irrational feelings of others that are born of their own traumas. Death happens in such magnitudes, and at what feels like such an accelerating rate, that it’s easy to become desenstized to it. HIV/AIDs claim one hundred times the causalities of 9/11 every year, globally. The recent series of mass shootings in Montreal, Virginia, Norway, and Colorado are both shocking and numbingly familiar.

It’s understandable that 9/11 isn’t as fresh in everyone’s minds as it is for most New Yorkers.  But my own experience with a tragedy of such magnitude has given me a deeper insight into the pain and tragedy of others. I don’t understand, in a profound way, the feelings that compel others to mark the events of the Holocaust or the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  However, because I instinctively, irrationally, quietly—and in my own admission, shamefully—celebrated Osama Bin Laden’s death, I can begin to approach a comprehension of the strong emotions that follow such tragedies, and the terrible acts of revenge that continue fuel more.

But that’s why, one day a year, it’s important for me to give September 11th its due. Remembrance is a human act. We do it to make sense of tragedy, to try against odds to keep history from repeating itself. It’s important to remember this event even though we will end up forgetting the feelings that make it necessary to remember: the shock, the horror, the loss that would prevent it from happening again. This is impossible, because each tragedy will lose its power for those who haven’t lived it. It will happen again, and we’ll get over it again. But it’s these shared feelings in the wake of horror that connect us across the gaps of time, location, identity.

If anything, the act of marking a date is a social signal to the victims of the next horror. That way, we at least live in a world that choses to remember.

It’s the an impossible goal that needs to persist: it’s a constant process of learning, unlearning, and relearning through the dynamic channels of history.

“What do I do?” the dust-covered ghosts asked my mother as they passed her vantage point on a broad downtown avenue that pointed directly towards the black, billowing, smoldering impossible. When in doubt, when the world has ended and you are somehow still standing, remember.

In his talk at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, Fidel Castro labeled the year the “hottest [one] in recorded history.” This was the very year that I was born. Hotter years have since been recorded; the last six months were the warmest ever. Castro’s speech was one that shone light on an imminent environmental crisis that looms larger with each passing day—20 years and two Earth summits later.

That same year, just as I turned one-week-old, a little known but now infamous part of Canada called Oka stole the limelight. Misguided motives, misplaced trust and missing priorities strained relations between the Mohawk people and the riverside town of Oka.

These two seemingly unrelated events are connected by two words: Plan Nord. Introduced in the Quebec Assembly last summer, Jean Charest’s swan song was pitched as an “economic development strategy” to inject benefits of industrial growth in Northern Quebec. This $80 billion investment has been since mired in controversy. Even among the aboriginal residents, voices of dissent were not heard in unison, as the Inuit and Crees supported the plan.

I side with the environmentalists. The plan is too deeply rooted in the capitalist notion that the aboriginals will lose their land—and the little livelihoods they make off it—to a distant promise of secure jobs. It bodes ill to dwell on hopes of a castle in thin air. Take for instance the claim of ‘developing boreal forests.’ The very idea of developing a forest seems specious. In this case, ‘development’ happens to comprise—amongst other activities—logging. The government’s Plan Nord document  claims that logging in the area would account for 53 per cent of Quebec’s annual wood production while supplying wood to 32 plants—only 11 of which happen to be in the area marked for Plan Nord.

If the irony of those figures don’t hit home, here’s another: $15.9 million has been granted to develop the ports in the region. Freely translated, this means the cost of recovery of this capital will involve a huge influx of foreign tourists into a fragile ecosystem. With an understanding of the impact of ecotourism on the Tibetan Plateau, I can safely vouch for the inefficacy of such a plan.

“Quebec and it’s northern zone are indissociable,” wrote Louis Edmond Hamelin in the government’s Plan Nord action plan. Yet, indissociability doesn’t lie in its geographical boundaries, but in the unity of the people who inhabit them. Design of developmental projects demand a social conscience to augment the numbers. Recent shift in power will, if anything, see faster spurts of “development and growth” driven by higher royalty percentages. The need of the hour is an unassuming mind—engaging in a dialogue—that is not disillusioned by the choices it has to make.

Two decades ago, American president George H.W. Bush declared at the Summit that “the American way of life is non-negotiable.” Today, such snobbery won’t get anyone very far in a planet that is common to all. Sooner rather than later, the shadows of our past will come to haunt us while the solution that lies in our hands today slips away. Pablo Neruda said that “…if we want to establish lands of dignity and integrity, lands where people can live in light and justice, then our guiding stars must be struggle and hope.” So, with stubborn hope, earnest desire, and unshaken patience, I wait.

In a US presidential campaign full of unremitting stupidity, the ‘fact-check’ has claimed the crown of the most tedious journalistic device used during this news cycle. Instead of raising the tone of the presidential debate by defending the truth, the fact-check has become another cudgel to be used in the partisan blame-game.

Originally designed to merely check the accuracy of facts and figures mentioned in speeches, the fact-check has now mutated into a shrill, subjective analysis of what can loosely be called facts, all in an attempt to receive page-views.

While the fact-check has proved its worthlessness for the past few months, the recent Republican and Democratic National Conventions really brought the shallowness of this industry to the forefront. For example, did you know that Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama are liars? They are not even normal liars, but pants-on-fire liars, judged by the number of ‘Pinocchios’ they have received in accordance with ABC’s fact-checking system.

A statement that Paul Ryan made on Mitt Romney’s website last week offers a look at fact-checking at work: “In July of 1980, the unemployment rate was 7.8 per cent. For the past 42 months, it’s been above 8 per cent under Barack Obama’s failed leadership. In 1980, under Jimmy Carter 330,000 businesses filed for bankruptcy. Last year, under President Obama’s failed leadership, 1.4 million businesses filed for bankruptcy.”

This is pretty standard campaign rhetoric, and anyone with less than half a brain can see that Ryan is simply trying to tie Obama to someone commonly thought of as a failed Democratic President. Yet ABC news in all of its wisdom dinged Ryan for failing to mention that when Ronald Reagan was president unemployment was once 9.8 per cent, all but forgetting his accurate statement of what the unemployment rate is under the Obama presidency. ABC further claimed that Ryan fudged his numbers about businesses filing for bankruptcy, because actually 331,264 businesses filed for bankruptcy under Carter, and 1,410,653 filed for bankruptcy under Obama. ABC news is against the practice of rounding. Expect an equally vigourous look into Obama’s claim in his speech last night, that he could create 600 000 jobs—a suspiciously exact number—in the natural gas sector.

Also note that, in fact-checking land, whenever Obama compares the economy under his administration to the economy under Bush, he is omitting the fact that the economy was much worse under FDR; thus, he is a liar for not providing proper context.

Partisan websites can then spin this lacking analysis into ‘gotcha’ headlines. Daily Kos used the ABC article to title a post called ‘Paul Ryan lying again. And again. And again,’ and then claimed that on the basis of these ‘faulty’ numbers that Paul Ryan is a “lying sack of [you-know-what].”

Unfortunately, the above fact-check is not an outlying example. Both campaigns have called the other a liar, using these ‘objective’ facts as evidence of their own chastity and the other side’s wonton neglect of the truth. It’s no surprise that the presidential campaign has morphed into an immature shouting match between two highly polarized sides.

Recently, the Romney campaign said that it would not let fact-checkers dictate the direction of its campaign. To that I say bravo, because what the fact-check websites are checking is nothing you and I would recognize as fact.