THE ARBOUR ENVIRONMENTAL YOUTH AWARD!!!

Here's a great story of a successful student youth initiative that got national acclaim. The Peace and Environmental Resources Center and the Arbour Youth Foundation have given the Arbour award to Jeff Monahan of Carlton University. This happened back in 2003. Jeff was one of the founders of a student-run food collective that was most environmentally minded at Carlton University. Jeff and other volunteers obtained food from local stores, restaurants and community gardens, most of which would have been discarded into the local landfill. The food was prepared and over 200 meals were served a day. The food was served on reusable plates with non-disposable cutlery and all the leftovers were integrated into the campus compost plan.
Emphasizing personal contact is an effective way to influence behavioural changes in your community. This initiative fosters an awareness of food and food product wastage, community support and environmental benefits. By diverting the food destined for the landfill to the mouths of hungry people in the community, while at the same time avoiding further production of waste, Jeff captured what was a net loss and created benefits in several sectors of his society. Jeff diverted waste from the landfill, fed hungry people, further recycled what was not used into compost and at each step made personal contact with his community thereby influencing there behaviour, maximizing existing social capital.

100 Mile Lunch!!!!

That's right, 700 grade six students are going to experience and learn about the social advantages of the 100 mile diet. The lunch portion of the Days of Action being held on April 22nd will serve all these kids a yummy lunch supplied by local growers. Strengthening the relationship between local food growers and local consumers benefits the environment directly through the reduction of harmful emissions. As community relationships with their food providers change it will discourage the use of chemical fertilizers and encourage the production of better tasting and more nutritious foods instead of those with long shelf lives. Furthermore, the adoption of local food production will shift consumer awareness toward regional land use and local sustainability, not to mention that more money will stay in the local economy. A move to support local economy requires a proactive community and will subsequently strengthen the core community.

Food miles (kilometers) are a metaphor or concept that refers to fact that the majority of urban and regional foods in the western world are being transported long distances to reach those consuming them. All of this transport consumes fossil fuels and emits green house gases and other pollutants into the world ecosystem and is resultant from the current application of “end of pipe” thinking. This short sighted mentality treats the natural environment as a limitless sink to dilute our wastes. The aim of a local food network is not to restrict consumption only to those products produced locally, instead it encourages communities to meet there natural potential. Food miles provide a way for the average consumer to visualize the costs of transporting food and encourages a community to exercise alternative, community based approaches to market economy.

Days of Action Approaches!!!

I wanted to address some of the challenges and successes involved in the preparations of the Earth day event called "Days of Action". It was important to have a thorough representation of all sectors in the community to collaborate on building up new social capital through a large community event such as this one. It was brought to the steering committee's attention that more First Nations representatives should be included. This made me feel that involving the entire community was an active duty and any missed representation of the community was in part a product of bad communication and a lack of thoroughness. It is difficult when attempting to do something good for the community to not make oversights that will devalue the concept and the efforts to bring the community together. This oversight was caught in good time and thorough representation will be made at the event.
Funding for the event has come from businesses in the community along with a large chunk of funding from the national scientific community called NSERC. Thanks to all the support from the community and from NSERC, the event will suffer no shortage of funding. The community for this project has extended far from the folks of school district #63 as it now includes supporters from NSERC, the district and the entire southern region of Vancouver Island. Creating relationships between neighbouring communities and between national and international communities offers a network capable of achieving goals that may not be possible without these relationships.

The Youth as Social Indicators!

As mentioned in earlier blogs, the levels of health and education of the youth in a community often reflect the level of social capital in that community. There are many approaches that are helpful to a community selecting indicators that are most suited to its needs, often these indicators focus on the most sensitive aspects of the community. Youth and adult education is the corner stone in any community and therefore the quality and availability of education in a community is essential to its economic and environmental well being. Education creates a forum where the children are brought together under one purpose, to gain insight and form tools and to apply these and tools to their own lives and to their communities. Recently, the Saanich school district has realized a 3.1 million deficit and their educational funding for schools on the Saanich peninsula. It is unsure how this funding shortfall will affect students and their achievements because there is a lag time between the affects of the quality of education and the graduation achievements. This may not seem to be characteristic of a social indicator, but the varying affects of education based on quality is felt across all generations of the community. A better educated community as a whole will often provide the organizational skills and insight to invest and grow social capital in the community. Seeing as a person's education begins early in their lives, serious monitoring and funding must be realized to maintain a quality level of education in the community. This is how we can measure the potential for growth of social capital in a community.

Bench Elementary Going Green!

The kids at Bench elementary in the Cowichan Valley came first in the Ecokids challenge put on by earth Day Canada in 2007-2008. These kids went all out in efforts to reduce the use of plastic bags in their community. Through educational skits, movies and presentations to all sectors of the community including their own cohort, politicians , city council and private schools.

Every monday of the week, a committee of kids at Bench elementary have a meeting and find a common environmental and comunity initiative to act upon. They kicked off their plastic bag campaign with a film created with the information gathered from a student survey regarding the use of plastic bags in the environment. The video was followed by a skit that depicted the life of a plastic bag. These efforts are educational and personal, as the information is provided by the youth of the community for the community. The kids started a campaign soon after the skit, that promoted the use of cloth grocery bags. They took the proceeds from the cloth bags and divided them between health program in Myanmar and a homeless shelter in nearby Duncan, BC.
The kids at Bench elementary have truly driven their community closer to each other and to the communities place in the environment. Way to go !

Testing you,testing me.

Here's your challenge!
Are you smarter then a grade sixer. Here are some skill testing questions that will enlighten you on local and global environmental issues. These questions represent just some of the information that young adults can use to educate their parents and their communities to influence environmental community initiatives. Here we go, (remember, this is Victoria, BC)

1. Methane is a major contributor to the planet's increasing temperature rise--or global warming. What is the greatest source of Methane gas in this area?

2. Where does our drinking water come from in the Victoria region?


3. Where does the garbage go that we leave out for pick-up?

4. This protocol was developed in 1992 as an international environmental treaty intended to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

5. This metal was commonly used for pipes in plumbing during Roman times, but it is now known to have poisonous effects on the living environment.

6. Foods that have had their DNA altered to enhance their growth possibilities are known as these, also represented by the acronym GMO.
Answer: Cows, Answer: Sooke Reservoir, Answer: Hartland land fill, Answer: Kyoto Protocol, Answer: Lead, Answer: Genetically Modified Organisms

Next blog we will take a close look at what the kids from Bench Elementary in the Cowichan Valley did to increase the social capital in their town and win the EcoKids challenge presented by Earth Day Canada.

Days of Action! Days of Youth!

April 22nd is approaching and the preparations are unfolding nicely. We have a winner for the environmental super hero contest, unfortunately the heroe(s) identity can not be disclosed. In preparing for the day big I've been researching other avenues different communities have established to engage the youth of their communities to take a leading role in environmental initiatives. There's this very informative and interactive website that caters to the youth with drawing games, videos, stuff about the rainforest, the ocean, global warming and on and on. Really colorful site. The title page is displayed in the photo gallery beside the post, and the URL is this. http://www.kidsforsavingearth.org/
As far instigating real changes in a community, I feel that the youth have the most power to make difference; parents will go to great lengths to protect their children. When a child becomes concerned about their own safety it inherently involves the whole community. Social capital in a a community could be measured by the children's welfare in that community. When a group of children voice their common environmental concerns through action and discussion in a community setting, things get done. The next blogs leading up to the April 22nd, Days of Action event, which times up well with Earth Day, will cover some youth initiative case studies from on the Island and around BC.

Ideas!!

Peninsula Streams is taking action on the peice of stream adjacent to Adam Kerr park. The stream currently suffers from drought like conditions during the summer, preventing the main stay of many water loving creatures that make up a healthy stream ecosystem. Currently, there is a well further down the creek and it has been proposed to move the water from the existing outlet further upstream which could provide water in the dry months. While we were visiting the stream we saw a muskrat chasing a rat, I liked this. The riparian zone of this section of the creek has been dominated by reed canary grass. It is unsure if the canary grasss is a totally invasive species or if the canary grass has spread further south on the Island. It behaves like an invasive and should be removed from the creek.
It is in the communities best interest to revive and preserve urban parks as they offer sanctuary to the individuals of the community. A park like Adam Kerr has the potential to support wildlife of all sorts. It seems to me that the degradation of urban parks is a reflection of how detached we've become from understanding why we valued parks in the first place.

Young Ambassadors of School District #63 Isolate Environmental Superhero

Currently Mr. Floatie is as close an environmental superhero as Victoria's got. The folks up in Sydney think it's about time a more attractive and versatile superhero bring environmental causes to the forefront of the community. The people in charge of creating the image and scope of this new environmental superhero are the grade sixer's for school district #63, North Saanich. Some of the contestant superheroes include Waterwoman, a woman so pure she can suck polluted water up her right arm and purify the water as it travels across her chest and out the other arm. Super leaf and Acorn Boy are a team of enviromental avengers whose ultra sensitivity to pollution make this pair the world's greatest duo of indicator organisms. Many other environmental superhero admissions were received for the grade 6'ers and all of them creative and educational. The winner of this contest will see their enviro superhero design come to life. The presence of the superhero in our communtiy will symbolize our ongoing stewardship and awareness of environmental initiatives while putting the youth in the driver seat.

Keep track of this blog to find updates regarding the environmental superhero contest and the big event coming up in April called, "Days of Action, 2009" put on by the creatures of habitat and Penninsula Streams and others. Keep in touch bloggers!!!!