Decision Making

These maps and charts are great in revealing the aggregate impacts of human activities. Although we live in an information age, we often can't 'see' the effects of our decision making on the commons and the landscape. For example, there are 450 billionaires with American citizenship, and half of them live in New York and California; Switzerland is the best place to be born; fewer people are dying from war than ever before; the most dangerous drugs in America are perfectly legal.

As part of our Solutions Agenda research project, we are leading an upcoming real time virtual dialogue on waste management in Canada, one of our nine themes. In the interim, this video is fascinating about how mushrooms could play a major role, cleaning polluted soils, as well as making insecticides, treating smallpox and even treating viruses.

The attached letter left to us by Gillian Bennett raises some very profound social issues we should be discussing as a society. Modern society is faced with many such challenges that we need our elected officials, civil society leaders, and business decision makers, to begin civic dialogues about the best ways to move forward.

"You should be innovating so fast that your're invalidating your prior patents". Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, announcing that his company is opening up its patents--on everything from batteries to charges--for fair use (Maclean's Magazine, July 7, 2014). Opening up the Tesla technology is an important contribution to reducing GHG emissions in the baby boomer lifetimes.

This video, besides having wonderful photography, shows the interconnection of life, place and space. What a wonderful world, brings to mind three simple principles for implementating sustainable development--doing no harm, minimizing our interventions wherever possible and the precautionary principle.

Pune in India is a leading innovator in sustainable waste management. In 2008, the city awarded a cooperative led by Saru Waghmare a contract to collect refuse from 400,000 households. I have written previously on United We Can, a social enterprise that organized Vancouver’s binners and dumpster divers into a waste depot in the Downtown Eastside.

The Harper Government is currently claiming that adopting a carbon tax would damage Canada’s economic performance. This claim is contrary to our climate change research in British Columbia. The recent outcomes of our climate change research in British Columbia and others shows that BC has reduced its fuel consumption by 15.1 percent since 2008, while the rest of Canada’s increased by 1.3 percent.

Friere (1970) talks about the power of many meaningful small steps for social change. The Info Ladies may at first blush seem like a small step, but it is slowly transforming Bangladeshi villages. Dressed in blue and pink uniforms, they bike to villages carrying in their bags a laptop, a camera to make films, but also tests for blood sugar and pregnancy, some cosmetics and shampoo.

Sometimes, I feel overwhelmed by the information and science that I read, and often wonder how to evaluate the ‘science’. This video challenges the theory that most of desertification is because of cattle and large mammals. This ecologist claims, just as once we were certain that the world was flat, we were wrong then and we are wrong about the causes of desertification.

I am back on my beloved campus at Royal Roads, it really is such a beautiful place here. Place matters very much to me, as I believe it matters to most people, and the diversity of scholarship here makes for some wonderful conversations. In our Live Chat last week on the climate adaptation and mitigation project, we talked about the importance of language, rather than 'carbon neutral' which could be perceived as not moving forward, 'climate positive' policies may be seen as more action oriented.