 Garry
Sowerby, holder of four world driving records and author of
Sowerby's Road
has been pushing the envelope of road trip adventure for the last
twenty-five years. "I was driving from Ottawa, Ontario to
Halifax, Nova Scotia with my old college buddy, Ken Langley, in
the fall of 1977 when the idea first surfaced," he says.
"We got into a discussion about what would be the ultimate
road trip and it soon became clear that an around-the-world drive
would be about as good as a road trip could get. Fascinated with
the idea, we began organizing an attempt to break the Guinness
World Record for Around-the-World driving. I resigned my commission
as a Captain in the Canadian Forces and then, with 47 shareholders
and much ado, Ken and I incorporated Odyssey International Limited."
Currently, Garry is on the road driving from Halifax, Nova Scotia
to Victoria, British Columbia championing the use of alternative
fuels in two state-of-the-art GM hybrid trucks utilizing celluose
ethanol and gasoline-electric combinations.
|
MISSION
GREEN ON THE MOVE
by Garry Sowerby
I bent down to pick up a tattered piece
of Styrofoam.
"You hit the mother lode!"
George, a retired IBM executive, yelled across one of the main roads
through Prince Edward County, Ontario.
My stomach heaved at the sight of hundreds of black ants covering
the underside of the crumbling piece of packing material. I imagined
the explosion of debris as the piece broke up on impact when it had
hit the ditch.
I expected to be somewhat grossed out
at what I encountered as I swept the ditch for trash, but legions of
ants, I had not anticipated.
Over the next hour, I filled three
large garbage bags with junk food wrappers, faded coffee cups, empty
cigarette packages, beer bottles, and dozens of cigarette butts.
Hartland, New Brunswick: One of Mission Green's hybrid truck emerges
from the longest covered bridge in the world
Lisa Calvi, Garry Sowerby, Bill Rumsey, and Stew Yule unload recycled
materials to build a house in Mont Arthabaska, Quebec
Mission Green collects roadside refuse in the annual Prince Edward
County "Trash Bash"
A load of used sneakers collected in Moncton, New Brunswick, as
part of the Re-Use-A-Shoe recycling program |
There were plenty of ants, but my fear
of coming face-to-face with a decomposing specimen of roadkill luckily
never materialized. I felt a full range of emotions toiling there in
the humidity; anger, disappointment, and eventually calm as I obsessed
on picking up every bit of trash in my assigned area.
It was Day 11 of Mission Green, our
cross-Canada road trip to salute 85 environmental initiatives, and Prince
Edward County's annual Trash Bash put our Green Team into the trenches.
Earlier this year, 800 people had hit the ditches on a one-day sweep
of 360 miles of the county's roads, so our 5.5-mile stretch was only
a sample of what the volunteers have gone through for the past 12 years.
Since our first salute to the Halifax Harbour
Cleanup on August 16th Bill Rumsey, Stewart Yule, and I have driven
two advanced-technology General Motors trucks a total of about 5,600
miles. During the first quarter of our quest, we surveyed the Sydney
Tar Ponds, tiptoed around a nesting area of the endangered Piping Plover
and visited the set of a television series that documents the construction
of a house made entirely of recycled or rejected materials.
We've loaded our Hybrid Chevy Silverado
with worn sneakers bound for a Nike facility where they will be recycled
into athletic products, hauled boxes of compost out of an Ontario resort
and removed the spoils of our Trash Bash salute.
At Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova
Scotia, Chancellor Arthur Irving proudly showed us some of the research
being carried out at the Harriet Irving Botanical Gardens on bio-soil
remediation, using plants to clean up contaminated soil. We've seen
the inner workings of an off-the-power-grid home.
We do not profess to be experts on
any of the initiatives we visit but certainly know a lot more about
what is going on in this country on the environmental front than we
did two weeks ago.
A few common denominators have emerged,
like the importance of education, of getting the word out. If change
is to take place, we must realize what has to be changed, why it must
be changed and understand that there are realistic and often relatively
simple ways to go about the process.
Mission Green is doing a little educating
of its own. Interest in the Chevy Hybrid truck's 15% fuel savings
without compromising utility has surprised plenty of the folk we've
met along the way. The fact that the cellulose-based ethanol we are
fueling the flex-fuel GMC Yukon with reduces greenhouse gases by a staggering
90% is a statement no one concerned with our environment can ignore.
But what has impressed me the most on this
cross-country trek is the passion of the people involved in the
initiatives we have visited. Management's dedication to ambitious plans
and researchers' visions of what their work will do for future generations
is obvious.
And as the sweat dripped down my forehead
on that muggy afternoon in the ditches of Prince Edward County, the
reality of what the workers deal with came through big time. Environmental
initiatives take plenty of sweat and hard physical work and those people
doing the sorting, the picking up and the cleaning are the front line.
It's a dirty job.
And now, a few days beyond our salute to
Trash Bash, the ant bites are still itching. But I can live with
them. After all, those ants were just doing their bit to clean up some
of the trash that finds its way out of car windows.
Check
out Mission Green's progress online!
Garry Sowerby
September 12, 2004
