An opinion piece in this newspaper on June 4 from the B.C. Chamber of Commerce and the Thriving Orcas, Thriving Communities Coalition (composed of a number of coastal communities’ chambers of commerce) warned that coastal communities are on the brink of extinction because they rely on recreational fishing, which is in jeopardy.
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As with COVID-19, this demand far exceeds the system’s capacity — only this time, we are talking about the Earth’s biocapacity. So far, we have only seen the ascending part of this chart. But as with any species that exceeds the carrying capacity of its ecological niche, at some point the curve reaches a peak and starts to decline; we might call it “The Great Deccelaration.”
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Hourly paid workers — who generally have low pay, few benefits and not much job security — are now almost two-thirds of the workforce. But while low-wage employment is down 30 per cent compared to a year ago, she adds, it is only down 1.3 per cent among high wage earners.
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A couple of weeks ago I noted that in addition to COVID-19, other major infectious diseases kill millions of people annually, mostly children, and mostly in low-income countries. But globally, and certainly in high-income countries, infectious diseases are not our major causes of death, disease and injury.
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In cutting funding to the World Health Organization in the midst of a pandemic, U.S. President Donald Trump may think he is attacking a bunch of faceless bureaucrats in Geneva and the World Health Organization’s regional offices around the world.
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In his daily briefing on April 9, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said: “Our country will come roaring back.” I understand why he might want to reassure people that everything would be fine, that this is just a temporary, if large, disruption to business-as-usual. But it’s much more than that.
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Because of Covid-19 we stand yet again at a crossroads of history. Too often in my lifetime we have stood at this same crossroads, and each time we have taken the wrong path. Will we get it right this time?
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This concern with the need to protect and restore the economy plays into a narrative about resilience, usually framed as the ability of people and communities to recover, to bounce back to where they were before the event ever happened.
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There is no question COVID-19 is a serious issue. If we did nothing, hundreds of thousands of Canadians, especially older people, might die and the health care system would be overwhelmed, jeopardizing the health of many other people with other health problems.
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With respect to poverty, the commission states: “The evidence is clear: early investments in children’s health, education and development have benefits that compound throughout the child’s lifetime.” But they note that many children live in poverty and there is a gap between what we know children need and what they get.
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These great ethical issues are made urgent by the Anthropocene: the massive and rapid human-created changes in the earth’s natural systems that threaten the viability of our society in the not-too-distant future.
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The third-largest component of our ecological footprint consists of buildings, and almost two-thirds of that is the operating energy used for heating, cooling, ventilation, lighting, cooking and powering electronics. Most of the rest is the embodied energy in the materials used to construct the buildings.
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Last week, I described some of the local “seeds” working to create a One Planet Region in the second-largest part of our ecological footprint — transportation. About three-quarters of the transport footprint is due to private vehicle use, most of which uses fossil fuels.
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This week, I begin to highlight some of our local “seeds” — groups and organizations that are working to create a One Planet Region. This is our local version of a good Anthropocene where we use only our fair share of the Earth’s resources while improving health and well-being in a way that is socially just.
Read moreSadly, there is not much good news about the state of the Earth these days. Climate change becomes more real as it starts to bite — just ask the Australians — and there is growing awareness of and concern about the extinction crisis we are triggering. We do have positive options, good choices and many opportunities.
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Some readers will doubtless recognize the reference to E.F. Schumacher’s classic 1973 book Small is Beautiful, in which he introduced the world to the concept of “Buddhist economics.” The book’s sub-title was “Economics as if people mattered,” which today we might amend to read “Economics as if people and the planet mattered.”
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While there has been an increasing public focus on climate change in the past few years, and a slow awakening to the threat it poses, we have yet to wake up fully to an even bigger problem. I noted in a September column that we face not only a climate emergency but an extinction emergency.
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The Midwinter Solstice is nearly upon us, and it is a powerful time of the year. For our ancestors, the shortening days and the growing cold must have been a source of concern every year; would the sun come back, would winter end?
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Forty years ago, I wrote about two principles that I considered fundamental to the health of the population: Ecological sanity and social justice. If we do not pay attention to these principles and what we now call the ecological and social determinants of health, the health of the population will be seriously harmed.
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Brain development in infancy is astonishing. According to the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University, a million connections are made in the brain every second — yes, every second — in the first three years of life.
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Based on Bioregional’s 10 “One Planet” principles, the initiative addresses the “usual suspects” of sustainability — energy, transportation, food, materials and waste, water, green space and so on. But Bioregional begins with three principles about people and community: Health and happiness, equity and the local economy, and culture and community.
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On July 29 we reached Earth Overshoot Day — the day when humanity’s overall Ecological Footprint (EF) exceeded the Earth’s ability to replenish sufficient biocapacity to meet our demands.
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Reducing the need for care means reducing the burden of disease within society. This requires both a government and society-wide provincial population health strategy and a much stronger commitment to public health and clinical prevention within the health-care system.
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The primary-care crisis has been getting a lot of attention in the community and in this newspaper recently. But the focus so far has been on the supply side — we need more doctors and other primary care providers, more services and a better system, everyone says.
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An important contributor to our large ecological footprint is urban sprawl, an energy and resource-hungry form of development that we cannot afford. It also is bad for our health.
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As of May 5, the pact is endorsed by 70 organizations from different sectors across Canada. There are nine in British Columbia, including the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs, and many individuals, a high proportion of whom are leading musicians and actors.
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The possible future encompasses all the things we can imagine happening, which can take it into the realm of science fiction. This is not to disparage science fiction; at its best, it can illuminate our present world and its values, and imagine and test ideas most of us have never considered.
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In recent weeks, we have seen large Canadian industries pressuring the Senate to favour their special interests over the wider health and environmental interests of Canadians. In the process, this unelected chamber is being asked to subvert the will of the elected House of Commons by delaying and effectively killing two bills.
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Life is lived on a bell curve. Many attributes of a population — height, for example — are distributed on a bell-shaped curve, with the average at the centre and then decreasing numbers of people as we get further from the centre.
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The proximity of Valentine’s Day and the plan by a University of Victoria student, Antonia Paquin, to create love letters for the Earth for Valentine’s Day, put me in mind of the work of Dr. Helen Caldicott, an internationally renowned Australian physician and anti-nuclear activist.
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Considerable derision has been heaped on Victoria city council for endorsing a class-action lawsuit against the fossil-fuel industry, seeking financial compensation for the added costs the city will incur as a result of climate change.
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The World Health Organization recently released a report on the top 10 threats to health in 2019. Strikingly, several are related to global ecological change, marking perhaps a turning point in the recognition of the health implications of the rapid and massive ecological changes we are causing.
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I have never lost the sense of awe I experienced one night as a teenager as I lay down in a dark spot and really looked at the Milky Way. It was overwhelming and humbling to realize what a small part of the galaxy our own seemingly vast solar system is, and what a tiny part of all that I am.
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‘Good evening. And now, here is the environment news.” Well, that is a daily news segment we won’t be coming across soon — although we should. But we do hear or see the business news on a daily basis, in fact many times a day.
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As the Oct. 20 municipal elections loom, I suggest we should be asking all candidates about a very serious issue — in fact, in my view, the most serious challenge we face in the 21st century, both globally and locally: How do we make the changes that move us toward being a One-Planet Region?
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We need to create a societal system that is perfectly designed to enable all the people of the world to live good quality lives within the bounds of the Earth and its ecological systems. What might such a system look like?
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The phrase — often shortened to: “Better living through chemistry” — has lodged in the public mind as an unintentionally ironic comment on the sometimes dubious benefits of the chemical industry. This industry is the largest manufacturing sector in the world, according to GreenCentre Canada, which claims that: “Chemistry makes everything we do possible.”
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The environment of our buildings, and especially our homes, is enormously important for us. As Sir Winston Churchill remarked: “First we shape our buildings, then they shape us.”
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The B.C. Healthy Built Environment Alliance was established by the Provincial Health Services Authority in 2007 to provide leadership and action for healthier, more livable communities.
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