November 2005 E-news
From
Funk to Junk
What: The
Otesha Project, a totally inspiring group
of youth that do cycling trips across the country and promote
sustainability, environmental justice and stewardship with
skits and other great theatre stuff, have put together a wickedly
good resource. The Otesha book is an awesome, out of the box
creation that takes a behind-the-scenes look at how our daily
actions change the world! It is designed to match the Otesha
Morning Choices Skit, with one phenomenal chapter for each
scene of the skit: Water, Clothing, Media, Coffee, Food, and
Transportation.
How: The pages of the books will be shipped
to wherever an Otesha presentation is occurring, and assembled
into books with reused cover materials by the audience members
themselves - allowing audiences to feel ownership over the
books, while obtaining an awesome follow-up tool! In many
cases, 'admission' to Otesha productions will actually be
an old cereal box and a piece of scrap material. See how
to make the funky post-consumer-waste
packages. The books are also evolving creations, with plenty
of blank pages for you to add in your own content and ideas.
There’s even a book-crossing system, where each book
will be tracked as it travels from reader to reader picking
up better ideas and even more good karma as it travels!
But… if you aren’t getting an Otesha presentation,
you can still get a book. Click
to download your own copy. Wahoo!
Why: We want the Otesha message to travel
even farther than we can, and we want to provide a follow-up
tool with more information, more inspiration, and more fun
(!) to the thousands of people who share our vision for a
better future.
Clean Air Achievers
Can you be a Clean Air Achiever? If you
want to get active for the environment and your own health,
then the answer is YES!
The Clean Air Achievers (CAA)program will be launched this
year in selected classrooms (Grades 7, 8, 9) in four cities
(and surrounding areas): Halifax, Ottawa, Toronto and Vancouver.
CAA helps you learn about how air quality, climate change,
transportation and your health are linked. CAA will challenge
you to adopt less polluting (compared to motorized vehicles
like cars and SUVs) ways to travel, especially by using active
means of transportation such as biking, rolling or walking.
You’ll love that our “spokespeople” aren’t
scientists from labs or researchers from universities –
they’re some of Canada’s top athletes, who literally
live and breathe active lifestyles. Our Champions know the
importance of air quality first-hand and are keen to tell
you about how they have made personal choices that have benefited
their own health and sport careers, and the environment. They
are passionate about getting active for our environment and
they will be coming to classrooms to explain how CAA works
and why they are committed to its goals.
You, your classmates, family and friends can make a significant
impact in reducing air pollution. Our Champions and our program
can help show you how.
So talk to your teacher about the possibility of your school
or class being selected for CAA. They can apply through the
Green Street website.
For more information, your teacher can contact the Project
Coordinator, Erin Down, at erin@cleanairchampions.ca.
You can also obtain information by e-mailing questions to:
info@cleanairchampions.ca.
For general information on Clean Air Champions please visit:
www.cleanairchampions.ca.
Video Contest
 With
the goal of celebrating the United Nations Decade of Education
for Sustainable Development and the 10th anniversary of MABnet,
the Man and the Biosphere Programme of UNESCO has launched
a video contest. Any individual or group wishing to produce
a film on the theme "People, Biodiversity and Ecology"
is invited to participate. Teams made up of students, teachers
and others (e.g. photographers and multimedia professionals)
are particularly encouraged, and the films must relate to
one or more Canadian biosphere reserves. Information on our
thirteen biosphere reserves can be found at www.biosphere-canada.ca.
Narratives for the video film may be in English, French
or Spanish. Participants in the competition must authorize
UNESCO to use the video film and other supporting materials
submitted for educational and other non-commercial purposes.
The video produced should be a "web-friendly" compressed
format, such as Standard AVI and MPEG formats, QuickTime format
and Real format. The length of the video should be minimum
6mn and maximum 10mn. The winner or winning team will be offered
a prize of US $2000.
The video must be submitted to the Canadian Commission for
UNESCO with the application form by November 7, 2005. Click
here to download an application form [Link to application
form].
For more information on the context, please visit: www.unesco.org/mab/background/contest.htm.
Student
On Ice
The connection between me and a receding glacier…
An Arctic trip let me tie together some loose ends, such
as climate change and a disappearing way of life, one that's
far away from mine.
By LEAH KASINSKY
Tuesday, October 11, 2005
I have recently returned from a youth expedition in the Arctic
aimed at investigating climate change and its environmental
and societal impacts.
This two-week momentous expedition was organized by Students
on Ice, an organization that aims to unite young minds with
scientific, educational, and political experts. It brings
them to either poles of the earth in order to forge a respect
for these isolated environments as well as to instil values
of proper stewardship of this land. Our team of 106 members
travelled from Iceland to Greenland, and ended at Baffin Island.
I stood atop the Snaefellsness glacier in Iceland. Having
battled seasickness the night before, we climbed upward wondering
when and if we would reach glacial territory. And suddenly,
as if summoned by our doubt, the clouds parted to reveal us
halfway into the glacier, surrounded only by blue sky and
a white blanket of clouds below us. If you stopped to listen,
you could hear the wind hit the snow. Or the sound of a glacier
melting and receding under the impact of the sun and the warming
atmosphere.
Four days into our Arctic journey I tied two loose ends together
and climate change and mass global pollution morphed from
an intangible set of statistics, or a worrisome article in
the newspaper, to the reality of a glacier receding under
my feet. It happened while we were racing through the milky
teal waters of an uncharted fjord in Greenland, toward one
of the fastest receding glaciers in the world, and watching
icebergs cave off it into the water bellow.
It also happened while listening to Shelia Watt-Cloutier,
the global Inuit spokesperson and head of the Inuit Circumpolar
Conference, speak about the dramatic change she has witnessed
in her lifetime. She talked about how the Inuit are changing
from a semi-nomadic people living off the land to a sedentary
village people, whose elders' knowledge of their environment
is losing relevance due to the unpredictability of the ice
with our warming climate. Perhaps most tragically, Inuit mothers
fear to breastfeed their children due to the large amounts
of pollutants -- like the pesticides we spray on our lawns
-- that work their way up into the arctic food chain and into
these mothers' breast milk. The amount of polychlorinated
biphenyls (PCBs) and mercury found in their breast milk have
been reported at toxic levels, far higher than those in polluting
metropolitan cities like Los Angeles.
The reality of my unconsciously consuming life on the 49th
parallel, polluting, warming and changing life above the 60th,
hit home again and again.
And my conscience screamed out at the injustice of a world
where those who had the largest hand in creating the problems
are not those who pay the price for it; where our green lawns
rob women of the basic right to breastfeed their children;
where polar bears are threatened with extinction because their
hunting grounds are melting away. That vast, cold land of
sea and sky, whose oceans team with life, is threatened by
being changed forever.
In the ocean between Iceland and Greenland, our boat glided
beside a blue whale mother and calf, at times less than 30
metres away. With the mirror-like water stretching to the
horizon in every direction, cut only by this giant, gentle
animal beside me, surfacing in unison with its young, a ball
caught in my throat and I asked myself, who are we to change
this landscape?
I returned from the journey, bustling from the airport through
scorching and screaming rush-hour traffic in 33-degree Vancouver,
wishing that each lone person in a car that I pass could have
the same eye-opening experience as myself.
I don't want to be an environmentalist who screams apocalyptic
messages: messages of tropical disease spreading north with
the heat; of drought leading to famine leading to war; of
rising sea levels destroying low-altitude countries like Bangladesh.
I don't want to do that because I see a lot of hope and opportunity
in the impact of the vote we cast in the details of our daily
lives.
For myself, it starts with consciousness of my actions and
their implications, whether it be turning off the lights every
time I leave the room, buying local organic produce at a farmers'
market so it doesn't have to travel halfway around the world,
buying second-hand clothes, or riding my bike. And as I grow
up, my consciousness of the rift between ourselves and our
environment will affect my decisions on where I work, how
I vote and what I dedicate my time and energy and life to.
Our changes need to start today. And not just on an international
stage with the Kyoto protocol. It needs to start from within,
with each individual recognizing the impact of daily decisions
on the world as a whole.
Inactivity, indecisiveness, and ignorance are choices. There
is no specific enemy here; we are interconnected as a species
and a planet and all in this boat together. Today I don't
simply want change, I am the change I want to see in the world.
Leah Kasinsky, 18, lives in Victoria.
If you want to check out more about Students On Ice and their
upcoming trips too, check out their website at www.studentsonice.com.
EnJeu: a Green Street Provider
Draw the Line, Protect Climate Now!
DEADLINE: November 10, 2005
 Concerned
about climate change? Think we should be doing more to stop
it? Here’s your chance to get involved! ENvironnement
JEUnesse invites you, and the youth around you, to be part
of our Draw the line: Protect the climate now! Campaign. The
goal of this campaign is to collect 10,000 drawings of actions
youth have or intend to take to reduced greenhouse gas emissions
and fight climate change.
The purpose of the campaign is two-fold. The first is to
engage youth in climate change discussions and to show them
that they too can make a difference through intelligent energy
use and by protecting our natural resources. The second is
because this winter Montreal will host the most important
international climate negotiation meeting EVER! We will put
one of the youth’s drawings in each of the official
conference welcome packages of the 10 000 anticipated delegates.
This will ensure that every government negotiator, business
representative and NGO campaigner attending the meeting will
know that somewhere in the world, youth are doing something
for the climate.
All remaining drawings will be put on public display at the
Complexe Guy-Favreau (a commercial complex located next to
the conference center). This is a great opportunity to engage
youth into the climate discussions; we hope you’ll help
us get them involved. So get out those paints!
If you’re working as a class, here’s a way to
create works of art while thinking about the actions you would
like to take to fight climate change.
- Brainstorm about your current knowledge of climate change.
To have a more informed discussion on climate change, you
may wish to do a small internet based research project the
day before (see the links below for more resources).
- Fill in the knowledge gaps that arise from this discussion
(again see the links below for more information).
- Get the word out that the next international climate change
meeting, the UN Climate Change Conference, Montreal 2005,
will take place in Montreal in December. Read some of the
history of the Kyoto Protocol (the links below!).
- Open up the discussion to express your opinions on the
subject as well as suggest ways in which you can take meaningful
action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in your own lives.
We suggest that you make a list of all the possible actions
one can do to reduce emissions and display it in a prominent
location to help you remember the actions you want to undertake.
Please note that the drawings must be on 8 ½ X 11
paper in order to be inserted into the delegates welcome packages!
We also recommend that the drawing:
- Include the youth’s first name, age and city (to
personalize it for the delegate)
- Represent a concrete action that a youth can undertake
to fight climate change
- Be done on post-consumption recycled paper
*Drawings denoting violence, racism or other inappropriate
subject matter will not be accepted or distributed.
Please send the drawings to the following address:
ENvironnement JEUnesse
454 rue Laurier East,
Montreal, Quebec H2J 1E7
Canada
*** Please note that drawings cannot be returned. ***
For further information please contact: aguillemette@enjeu.qc.ca
Or, check out these links for more info too:
www.co2zilla.ca
(One-Tonne Challenge for Youth website)
www.climatechange.gc.ca
(Official Government of Canada website on climate change,
includes resources for teachers)
www.unfccc.int
(Official website of the Climate Change Convention website
– check out the Essential Background section for easy-to-read
background material on climate change and the international
process)
www.montreal2005.gc.ca
(Official Government of Canada Website for the Montreal Conference)
www.beyondkyoto.org (Youth website for the Montreal Conference)
www.enjeu.qc.ca
(Our website!)
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