By Adam Donnelly

Kamloops residents embrace Green Living Expo

May 1, 2016 | 5:21 PM

KAMLOOPS — Minimizing your impact on the environment is a hot topic these days. It seems every time you turn around, there’s a new fad or different way of making your day-to-day life more sustainable. On Saturday, the City of Kamloops teamed up with some of it’s partners to help make those changes in lifestyle easier on residents, by hosting a Green Living Expo.

From gardening, to composting, transit, and urban chickens. There was a wide variety of information on display at the Green Living Expo this weekend.

According to the City’s Sustainability Services Supervisor, Glen Cheetham, “People in Kamloops are ready to embrace this topic, this idea of trying to be better, and lessen their carbon footprint. Look for ways to practice, or demonstrate environmental stewardship.”

Making the choice to lessen one’s impact on the environment isn’t easy. Not only does it take a conscious choice, but also requires accountability, according to James Gordon of the TRU Sustainability Office.

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“The basic research that I’ve read is that if you make a pledge, and you put it in a public sphere… and have someone to support you in that pledge, there’s a better chance you’ll follow through with it, than if you’re just making it inside your head, for example,” Gordon told CFJC Today.

James Gordon’s pledge is simple. “Every year, around this time of of the year in the spring,  I always have a pledge just to become a better gardener,” said Gordon. “I’m trying to learn the little things, because it seems like gardening is all about learning about the little things.”

Gordon’s help was just down the floor of the Sandman Centre, where Elaine Sedgman, and the rest of the Thompson-Shuswap Master Gardeners were set up, showing off ways to make your veggie patch a little greener this year.

Sedgman says if you know how to attract the right kids of insects by the plants you pick for your garden, you don’t need pesticides.

“I plant FOR bugs,” Sedgman said with a smile. “All my flowers in my garden are meant to attract the good insects, like ladybugs.”

As well as growing their own produce, Kamloops residents could very well be raising chickens, soon. Mary Ellen Dalgleish, from Purity Feeds says people want to understand where their food comes from.

“The big thing is that knowing what they’ve put into that chicken is what they’re going to eat afterwards,” said Dalgleish.

For Cheetham, the response of residents to the event was just what the city was hoping for.

‘It says a lot about Kamloops,” Cheetham said about the turnout to the Expo, “It’s a very good day for Kamloops, for sure.”