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.
November 4th, 2013
There are many recent conversations about integrating the arts into sustainability, cities and resilience. I know of one artist, Nancyanne Cowell, who fundamentally integrates the environment into her art, referring to them as ecoscapes. Her art ‘allows’ us to literally see landscapes in different ways, and is always accompanied by a story.
While preparing a presentation this morning for a panel discussion in Montreal this coming Saturday on planetary resilience, I strated thinking about how the world is shifting in fundamental ways that are impossible to determine, thus making the aiblity to anticipate trends and patterns even more important for educators, business leaders and goverment decision-makers. There will also be major policy shifts and as I was writing this, the Canadian Press just reported that two American states--Washington and Orgeon are planning to adopt BC's carbon tax.
The secretary of the United Nations has appealed for a big push to achieve as many as possible of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals by the deadline of December 31, 2015. Two other reports also call for the eradication of poverty as the number-one priority and set out complementary goals concerned with gender equality, education, health, food, water and sanitation, climate change, energy, employment, natural resources, governance, peace, and finance.
Since my beloved mother died on March 26th, I haven't had the psychological energy to write more on this topic, but this video has spurred me to write. Mother had a catrastosphic stroke a month before she died, and another last one the week before she died. My family unanimously agreed that euthanasia, if available, would have been both her choice and our choice after the second stroke. I am still struggling with forgetting how she had to die, in spite of being in palliative care.
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.
October 5th, 2013
One of my students once asked me what was the most important for sustainable development. I replied, maybe we don't need more science, more information, but we need more kindness, to one another, the planet and to other species. This video by George Saunder's on advice to graduates eloquently discusses what he considers to be his greatest failure, failures of kindness.