How I found my Eden.
Post by guest blogger Bonita Poulin.
I became disabled by Multiple Chemical Sensitivities in the fall of 1999 after working for 10 years in a laundry products factory. A few years later, my husband also became disabled by severe asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) from working in the barns of a huge chicken factory-farm. We were living on a 25-acre hobby farm in a valley surrounded by farmland and I’m sure the pesticide run off was probably contaminating our well.
I loved that hobby farm! I had realized my dream there of owning horses and had even raised and trained my own horse from a colt.
Since the house was very small, we planned on putting on an addition and fixing it up.
After having problems getting contractors to come out to give quotes, I realized that perhaps it was for the best. The air quality in the area was terrible. We lived about five miles outside of a factory town and the biggest polluter was the factory where I used to work. Whenever the wind would blow from the east, all we could smell was the perfume from the laundry detergent and fabric softener sheets and I would be sick for hours or days a time. Living in the valley made things worse because the wood smoke and other pollution would hang in the air. Our neighbors all burned their garbage, too, which greatly added to our discomfort. Most of the time we could not even be outside to enjoy our own property.
By now my husband could not walk 10 feet without having an asthma attack. I came to realize that if we stayed here, the pollution would kill us! We had to move to a safer area.
My research began. I discovered that Newfoundland had the best air quality in Canada but they also had too much rain and snow for our liking. Then I discovered Pollution Watch, a Canadian website where you can plug in your postal code and find all the major polluters in your area, along with what they are spewing and how much. (There is a similar site for US data at Scorecard). With the help of this website and Google Earth maps, I discovered that the area east of Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario would be a safe area to move to as there was no industry except for logging, no major highways, no big farms and not much of a population, which all spelled less pollution. It was also within a couple of hours of where our families lived.
Next, I scoured real estate websites, especially for sale by owner sites, since we had previously had some negative dealings with real estate agents. It was on one of these sites that I found our current home.
It’s a 10-year-old log home constructed of 100-year-old cedar logs sitting high on a hill surrounded by boreal forest. The closest neighbor is a half mile away, yet it’s only two miles to a village that has gas pumps, a fire hall, general store, post office and restaurant…. everything you need.
To top it off, the owner had emphysema and so had built the house to be safe for him. The floors are hardwood and ceramic. The walls are either untreated log or untreated tongue and groove pine. The only drywall is a one foot strip above the tub surround. The house also has a heat recovery ventilator so there is always a good supply of fresh, filtered air. The lawns and gardens are all organic and the owner had even planted an herb garden and built a homemade greenhouse.
Through talking with the owner we learned that he had been able to get off all his medications while living in this safe environment. The only things that worried me were the airtight wood stove they heated with and the propane cook stove. It turns out that I am fine with them both and they sure have come in handy during power outages!
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Bonita Poulin is a guest blogger at The Canary Report. She’s an activist in the MCS community and is the Canadian coordinator for MCS-Global, an organization dedicated to MCS awareness based in Australia. She also contributes to Eco-Sense, a magazine of the Environmental Health Association of Ontario.
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