Last week, I summarized five of the eight critical shifts identified in a recent UN Environment Programme (UNEP) report, Navigating New Horizons, which is “a global foresight report on planetary health and human well-being.” I also touched on a sixth critical shift: persistent and widening inequalities.
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In a very real sense, we are indeed separated from nature. In North America we are 80 per cent urbanized and we spend 90 per cent of our time indoors — and a further five per cent in cars and other vehicles. So we — and especially our children — have very little contact with nature, and most of that is…
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You are invited to run with the International Peace Torch (peacerun.org) on June 24, 2024, at 10:00 am – from the Coho ferry terminal to City Hall (& beyond!)
Read moreThe Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto just released a report on another industry that in various ways harms health — gambling. Not only can it be addictive and harmful to health and social wellbeing, its impact is disproportionately experienced by low-income people…
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So far, in examining what the World Health Organization calls the commercial determinants of health, I have been looking at private sector firms that produce products that harm health, such as tobacco, fossil fuels or unhealthy foods.
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SUPPLY Victoria Creative Reuse Centre is hiring! We’re looking for a full-time, permanent Reuse Retail Manager to oversee day-to-day operations including retail sales, donation processing, and volunteer management at our art-meets-environmental nonprofit.
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Ecoforestry Institute is seeking an Assistant Educator/Naturalist passionate about protecting BC’s forests, to run interpretive ecoforestry and ecology based school workshops, summer camps, and public tours at Wildwood Ecoforest near Ladysmith.
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The Sustainability Blueprint – Practical Climate Adaptation Actions for You, Your Family, and Your Community offers an action-oriented and practical new approach to the two major challenges threatening humanity and the planet: the climate crisis and the ongoing disasters.
Read moreThe Department of Educational Psychology and Leadership Studies at UVic is pleased to welcome applications for our 2024 MEd program in Leadership Studies! Applications deadline extended to March 1, 2024.
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The Executive Director of the Urban Development Institute Capital Region, told View Royal Council during public input: “UDI is not a lobbying group.” Not only is the UDI a legally registered lobbying group, according to the BC Lobbyists Registry but the Executive Director…
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The end of the year is always a time for reflection, but more so this past year, which has been significant for me in four key ways. First and foremost, I turned 75. That’s three-quarters of a century, and that’s given me pause for thought — I really am getting old!
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It’s that time of year, when Charles Dickens’ story of Ebenezer Scrooge and the Cratchit family is everywhere. But it’s not just a charming story of how a mean old curmudgeon sees the light and becomes a kindly old gent and a generous benefactor to his employee, Bob Cratchit.
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A call to care ever more deeply, widely. To see the interelated critical issues facing the world: Seven young activists who refuse to remain silent and inactive. A call for all of us to support them in their passions.
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I first came across Joe Brewer’s work some years ago in an article he wrote critiquing the failure of universities to address in a comprehensive manner the complex ecological, social and cultural challenges we face. He began his 2017 article “Why Are Universities Failing Humanity?” with this statement…
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The Wisdom of Tree Symbology, a poem. Living on the plains of hope and dotted throughout the hills, The ancient olive tree is standing oh so still, Its roots have survived over all these years, Bearing fruit that when pressed cries salt free tears, A national tree shared by two feuding nations…
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I have spent the last couple of months exploring the global polycrisis and the set of responses — great turnarounds — proposed in the Earth For All report. But what, you might reasonably ask, does this all mean for us here in the Greater Victoria region? How can its concepts be translated into local action?
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Earth For All is the title of a September 2022 report from the Transformational Economics Commission to the Club of Rome. It is also “an international initiative to accelerate the systems-change we need for an equitable future on a finite planet.”
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Get the tools you need to use collaborative art to ignite change in your communities! This virtual Masterclass explores the transformative power of art and how it can create change in your school, community, city, and beyond!
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The report’s authors stress the need for improvement in “women’s access to education, economic opportunities and dignified jobs, and all life’s chances that these bring.” The education and empowerment of women and their involvement in the economy, they note, is strongly linked to reduced fertility rates and a reduction in population size.
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In the past few weeks, I have been stressing the need for a rapid transformation of our society if we are to ensure people around the world can have good lives within planetary boundaries. A recent article in a (British) Royal Society journal by Prof. Timothy Lenton, a leading Earth-system scientist…
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Last week I looked at the 1977 Science Council of Canada report “Canada as a Conserver Society.” The report recommended “Canadians as individuals, and their governments, institutions, and industries, begin the transition from a consumer society preoccupied with resource exploitation to a conserver society engaged in more constructive endeavours.”
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More than a decade ago, a group of Earth system scientists developed the concept of planetary boundaries. They identified a set of a dozen or so Earth systems and proposed thresholds for each system beyond which it was likely that the system’s stability and resilience would be compromised.
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There is much discussion about the implications of artificial intelligence (AI) for humanity. Many of its impacts are likely to be good — AI has already helped develop new and better antibiotics — but not all of them, and some may be downright ugly.
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We may be economically better off, but we are not much better off in human and social development terms, and we are eating away at the Earth’s life-support systems on which we ultimately depend. Clearly, we need a new economic system, one based on growing all four forms of capital — natural, human, social and produced (or economic) capital — simultaneously.
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Local Salish Sea activists Brandon Letsinger and Clare Attwell, announced as the Systems and Governance Edge Prize Winners – for their recently launched Regenerate Cascadia initiative.
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The mistake is to see capital largely or only in economic terms, either as financial capital (money, stocks and bonds etc.) or as produced capital — the stuff we produce and own, from trinkets to cities. Hence the heavy focus on the economy, on GDP, on economic growth and the price of stocks and shares, on wages and benefits.
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