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Clean Air Commute Week – June 22-26, 2009

Published by

Published June 22, 2009

by iris_author

New Release from CSBO.

Help us prove nothing is possible.

CONTRIBUTE NOTHING TO POLLUTION. YORK UNIVERSITY TRANSPORTATION AND PARKING SERVICES HAVE TEAMED UP WITH SMART COMMUTE NORTH TORONTO, VAUGHAN TO TAKE PART IN POLLUTION PROBE’S CLEAN AIR COMMUTE.

JOIN IN THE FIGHT TO REDUCE SMOG AND STOP CLIMATE CHANGE. TAKE PART IN YORK UNIVERSITY'S CLEAN AIR COMMUTE THIS WEEK FOR YOUR CHANCE TO WIN A BIKE, A LAPTOP OR EVEN A CARIBBEAN CRUISE!

Transportation accounts for 25 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in Canada. By clean air commuting, you make a difference and reduce the impact that your commuting behaviour has on the environment.

It only takes a few small changes to your daily routine and, even if you only clean air commute for one day, you’re still participating and can win a prize for your efforts. You can even take part just by checking the air in your tires – anything that helps reduce emissions helps clean the air! Sign-up today for your on-line Diary Card to track your success!

You can participate by: Walking/ biking/ running, taking public transit, carpooling, working from home, tuning up your car, driving an electric or natural gas vehicle or by driving a scooter or motorcycle.

Just sign up for your unique York University Diary Card at this link to track the amount of emissions you reduce and be entered to win great prizes! A hard copy of the Diary Card will also be available outside the Parking & Transportation offices in the William Small Centre. Submit your diary card to room 120 William Small Centre, by June 30th for your chance to win!

Check out www.SmartCommuteNTV.ca for ongoing coverage about Clean Air Commute Events. Together we can prove nothing is possible!

For more information, email info@SmartCommuteNTV.ca.
To Sign-up for York University’s Carpool Zone: http://yorku.carpoolzone.smartcommute.ca/en/my/

Posted in: Events | IRIS News

HOME – we only have one planet

Published by

Published June 8, 2009

by dbazely

As illustrated (I hope) by IRIS blogs, You Tube CAN be educational (although I am prepared to bet quite a lot that most people aren't being much educated while logged on to on the site). 

I recently learned from You Tube, that a there is new doc out from photographer extraordinaire, Yann Arthus-Bertrand, called HOME. You can watch HOME on You Tube for a few more days. If you don't know about his book, the Earth from Above, please, do check it out - it's amazing.

Dawn R. Bazely

Posted in: Blogs | Events | IRIS Director Blog | Sustainability News

United Nations General Assembly passes landmark resolution about climate change

Published by

Published June 6, 2009

by dbazely

Last Thursday, while in Ottawa, during the 2030 North conference, I turned on the tv to see a beautiful young woman from Palau, with a flower behind her ear, talking about a historic UN General Assembly resolution that was passed on Wednesday. Small island states have been running a campaign about the threat that rising sea levels pose to their security. The link between climate change and the security of many countries was formally recognized. We heard a lot about this issue at our "Ecojustice: How will disenfranchised peoples adapt to climate change?" conference, in April, 2009.

Here's some of the press release:

"Introducing the draft in the Assembly today, on behalf of the Pacific Small Island Developing States, Nauru’s representative emphasized that rising oceans could, sooner than previously thought, leave little of that regional group’s already tiny homelands above water unless urgent action was taken. Already, the impact of climate change included inundation of heavily populated coastal areas, loss of freshwater, failure of agriculture and other results of saltwater intrusion.

As a result, resettlement and migration were already occurring and dangers to international peace and security would soon increase, she stressed. The Assembly’s adoption of the text would encourage dealing with climate change in a holistic manner, while demonstrating serious concern for the survival of whole populations and the existence of their lands.

Nicaragua’s representative, speaking before the vote on behalf of the “like-minded group” -- Bahrain, Bolivia, Ecuador, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Malaysia, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Yemen and Venezuela -– said the group would join the consensus on the compromise text. In addressing the issue, however, it was vital that Member States, particularly industrialized nations, promote sustainable development, while adhering to the principle of common but differentiated responsibility, and fully implement Agenda 21 and other relevant development commitments.

Following the Assembly’s adoption of the resolution, the representatives of many small island developing States took the floor to underscore the dire nature of the threats that climate change posed to their nations, including the Marshall Islands, Palau, Tuvalu, Solomon Islands, Fiji, Samoa and the Maldives.

Palau’s representative said: “We do not carelessly call climate change a security threat. When we are told by scientists to prepare for humanitarian crisis, including exodus, in our lifetimes, how can it be different from preparing for a threat like war?” All United Nations organs, most particularly the Security Council, must act urgently. Under Chapter VI of the Charter, the Council may investigate any dispute or situation that might lead to international friction or give rise to a dispute. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions must be the focus, and the goal must be effective, enforceable action to that end."

Dawn R. Bazely

Posted in: Blogs | IRIS Director Blog | Sustainability News

Gwynne Dyer on Climate Wars at 2030 North in Ottawa, 2009

Published by

Published June 5, 2009

by dbazely

I have recently been attending loads of conferences and workshops at which climate change is on the agenda. Most of them were permeated by a complete lack of any sense of urgency about what climate change will mean for North Americans in the next 20 years. So, I found Gwynne Dyer's gloom and doom in his talk on Climate Wars, sponsored by WWF, and delivered in conjunction with the 2030 North conference in Ottawa this week, to be very refreshing.  In his presentation on  the state-centred security dimensions of climate change, three main points stuck with me:

1. military generals in the USA are pondering how to deal with forthcoming events such as Florida disappearing when the ice caps melt. This contrasts with what I found when I flew into Ft. Lauderdale for a 2003 conference on invasive plants. I made a point of asking about 10 staff at my hotel whether they were at all worried about the sea level rises that would inevitably accompany the melting ice caps: I should note that I have teaching research into global warming in my ecology courses since 1990.  Without exception, the staff all looked at me as if I had just grown 2 heads!  How times change - at least in some parts of North American society.

2. a retired US General that he interviewed, said that he viewed the potential for nuclear attack during the Cold War as a "low probability, high consequence event" whereas Climate Change (warming) is a "high probability, high consequence event".

3. never mind about the Arctic, northern nations should worry about the nations to the south, where a 2 degree temperature rise (we are now hearing about a 4 degree temperature rise scenario), will mean that crop plants can't grow and survive.  A government that can't feed it's population is unlikely to be stable.

Hmm - the lights in the hotel ballroom where the talk took place were blazing, and I couldn't tell if there were low energy light bulbs - I hoped so.

Dawn R. Bazely

Posted in: Blogs | IRIS Director Blog

Pistachio’s Heather Reisman – “Buy less. Buy better. Buy forever”

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Published May 29, 2009

by dbazely

This past Christmas, I was delighted to find a great range of cards from Pistachio (the latest project of Heather Reisman of Chapters-Indigo). They were "Walking in a Winter Wonderland" cards, which thereby extended the Christmas card-sending season to March.  Plus, they were FSC-branded, 100% post-consumer waste fibre, Soya Ink, powered by Green Energy - Mohawk, Made in Canada.  Yeh!! Every kind of serious sustainability logo, right there. My decade-long lack of enthusiasm for cards has largely been driven by concerns about ecological footprints, as well as time crunches associated with grading 100s of final exams and essays at Christmas and attending untold numbers of "festivals of lights" school celebrations. But, I acknowledge that cards are an important means of staying connected and serve an important social purpose.  These Pistachio cards allowed me to do that, and simultaneously underscore my sustainability message to friends and relatives.

Pistachio was back in my thoughts today, thanks to Jennifer Well's article in the Globe and Mail Business magazine: "It's not easy being Pistachio - Heather Reisman is moving eco-products upscale. But will her aim exceed consumers' reach?" Reisman is quoted as saying: "Buy less. Buy better. Buy forever." Wow!!

Reisman has found that people are willing to pay a 5-15% premium for sustainable, ethically-sourced items.  This compares surprisingly closely with the student responses to question 9 of IRIS' Carbon Offsetting survey, in which just under 50% of those surveyed saying that they would pay 5-10% more for environmentally friendly products.  Only 20% said that they would be willing to pay over a 10% premium.

I wish Pistachio all the best, and recently stocked up on their thank you cards. But what I'd really like to see, and would buy, is a set of cards with the "Buy less. Buy better. Buy forever." slogan emblazoned across the front.

Dawn Bazely

Posted in: Blogs | IRIS Director Blog | Shopping the Talk | Sustainability News

Is there a connection between animal rights and sustainability?

Published by

Published May 27, 2009

by dbazely

Her Excellency, Michaelle Jean, Governor General of Canada's participation in a community feast in Nunavut, in which she helped to gut and eat seal, has ignited a storm of protest from animal rights activists.  As it turns out, I have some experience interacting with our local animal rights activists.  The research that I have done on the ecology of deciduous forests in Ontario in the last 20 years has brought me into contact with people with widely differing knowledge about and values relating to animals, including animal rights activists opposed to the reduction of high deer densities in small forest patches. Consequently, I have developed an interest in the questions of, whether and how, animal rights activists perceive their activism to be related to questions of the environment, climate change and the research fields of animal behaviour.

Here's some of what I have learned:

1.  Animal welfare differs from animal rights.  I am a strong advocate for animal welfare.  At Oxford University, where I did my doctorate on Animal Behaviour in the Zoology Department, I was lucky to get to know Prof. Marion Dawkins, an internationally-recognized expert on animal welfare. Most people that I know agree that the basic principle of animal welfare is a good thing.  As a result of my research experience, I hold, what I am sure many people would consider to be a number of radical opinions about pet ownership.  For example, I  generally disagree with the idea of urban dwellers  owning "working" dogs such collies, because, having worked with these dogs, I have seen what they are bred to do: they actually need huge amounts of exercise and they love to "work" - as in sheep herding, etc. - which they don't get much of as city-dogs.  But, I am not a supporter of animal rights - and I don't think dogs should have the same rights as humans!  This is an important point of clarification early on with animal rights activists.

2.  Most animal rights activists with whom I have spoken, are generally unaware of the broader issues surrounding biodiversity, ecology, ecological footprints and sustainability.  I usually encourage them to kick-start their broadened education by reading the international Convention on Biological Diversity.  In the case where animal rights activists do adopt scientific language, and refer to academic research, I have found that they often end up in similar territory to that which I have observed is occupied by representatives of groups such as climate-change deniers whose funding may be somehow linked to the lobbyists for big oil: their use of the primary and secondary literature is highly selective and biased.

3. There are many inconsistencies between the words and actions of animal rights activists.  Apart from the usual questions that I have, such as, why focus on seals and not cockroaches(?), I have observed that many animal rights activists are quick to accuse others of being disrespectful to them, but are, themselves, very comfortable with making extreme public statements attacking other people's values - such as "shooting a deer is barbaric".  I firmly believe that all voices and views must be brought to the table when it comes to considering sustainability, but, this does not absolve those voices from being held accountable for rude, disruptive and disrespectful behaviour.  Additionally, as an academic, I tend to pay rather less attention to uninformed, idealogically-driven, extreme opinions than to informed, nuanced opinions that take account of grey areas.

Dawn R. Bazely

Posted in: Blogs | IRIS Director Blog

Sleeping Children Around the World: a sustainable charity

Published by

Published May 23, 2009

by dbazely

In a meeting last week, a colleague challenged me that not all academic research is related to sustainability.  "Not so!" I declared. "Sure, you can do very tightly, and narrowly focused research on a very specific topic, that clearly has nothing to do with sustainability. BUT, the minute that you broaden the focus, relate it to the real world and give it an applied aspect, some kind of sustainability facet will, undoubtedly, emerge."  Being me, I then challenged him to name ANY topic of science-based research, and I described the sustainability-aspect of the research.

So - what about SUSTAINABLE charities?  Well, yesterday, I attended the opening of Parkdale Collegiate Institute's 120th Anniversary celebrations.  Parkdale CI is the second oldest high school in Toronto.  After rushing back to Toronto from field work, measuring trees, to make hummus for the school's International Buffet, I checked out various classroom displays.  I was delighted to learn that the school fundraises for the charity, Sleeping Children Around the World.  I had heard about this charity, but did not know anything about them.  The first thing that caught my eye, is that they have zero overhead.  The first question that we have trained our kids to ask of charities, is: "what's your administrative overhead" (my husband works for a charity).  For $35, children are provided with a bed kit - pillow, blanket, malaria netting, if needed, some basic utensils and school supplies, all locally-sourced.  It's all volunteer-driven - no big corporate structure, and is my kind of low-tech, low-budget enterprise that has proven staying power - or sustainability!

That's not to say that the goals of some charities require what may amount to a relatively large and expensive infrastructure to meet their goals.  This is especially true if the goal of their charities is to call for change on a very large scale that requires them to engage with the top levels of well-funded government bureaucrats and international corporations.  It's really important for everyone to understand what kind of activities in this regard, the organizations that they might be supporting, are engaging in.

But, what SCAW mainly demonstrates is how much can be achieved with a little and just how sustainable an idea like this can be.

Dawn R. Bazely

Posted in: Blogs | IRIS Director Blog

Obesity adds to global warming – but where’s the paper?

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Published May 19, 2009

by dbazely

The reason why I found blogging so tough to sustain, was that I could not overcome my urge to check into every last detail, and the time needed to fact-check my blogs was getting way out of hand. Here's one hitherto unpublished blog: last May, 2008, the Globe & Mail's Life section had an article about the research of Dr. Phil Edwards, Senior Lecturer, and Prof. Ian Roberts, at the prestigious London School of Hygeine & Tropical Medicine. Basically, the Globe (along with other media outlets, including the USA's MSNBC site, CNN and the UK's Daily Telegraph) carried the story, entitled "Obesity adds to global warming", about the research that describes how obese and overweight people "require more fuel to transport them and the food they eat", and then makes the link between this and the greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, that is driving climate change. I interpreted this as leaving me with the following take home sustainability message - "eat less and lose weight, and not just for for your own health, but for the environment."

This reported research finding illustrates two really important things about the pain of peer-reviewed research: As scientists, we often take years to show that intuitive ideas and guesses do hold. There are no surprises about this particular result - it takes more energy to move heavy goods (you pay more for it at the post office). BUT - I am more likely to take this finding seriously because it comes from academics who have published their research through the highly-scrutinized peer-review process. This is known as "publish or perish" and it's what makes university-based research more reliable than non-refereed, unscrutinized research.

The second thing, is that as a scientist, it's not enough for me to read about this in the newspaper. I immediately went to access The Lancet, the prestigious journal in which the study was published. And this is where the fun began. First, I could not find any such article in the latest on-line issue, which I accessed through the York University Library. So, I searched the entire contents of the journal. I found a just-published article called "Transport Policy is Food Policy" by the two authors, which I thought MUST be the journal paper that all the media outlets were referring to. BUT, the download link to the pdf was wrong and it gave me another article (this does occasionally happen with on-line science journals). After a bit more persistence, I DID get the article, which turns out not to be a full journal article, but an item of correspondence. Hmm - I wonder what the review process is for 'correspondence'?

Next I found, by googling a bit more, that there are numerous peer-reviewed journal articles making the links between greenhouse gas emissions, food transportation policy and obesity. Wow - I had no idea that this was such an academic issue. Next, I read some articles that quote a bunch of US Academics who counter the point of the Edwards & Robert's paper.  Wow, this could have taken the entire weekend to research, so, in the end I gave up my Saturday morning blogging in frustration at the time sink I was turning it into, and grabbed another cup of coffee. Next time someone asks me exactly how the kind of thinking that I do about sustainability differs from non-professorial sustainability thinkers, I will direct them to this blog.

Dawn Bazely

Posted in: Blogs | IRIS Director Blog

Save The Walrus – by reading and subscribing to it

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Published May 19, 2009

by dbazely

We have just decided to do our little bit, and to renew our family subscription to The Walrus magazine, which has been in financial peril, as far as I can tell, since its inception. This is very unfortunate, because it has some of the most thoughtful, in-depth writing about sustainability issues to be found anywhere in Canada, and, indeed, in the world.  For example, the article on urban agriculture, The Future Has Begun in Jan-Feb 2009 is excellent. When I look at our attempt at an urban eco-garden - note the clothes line, upside-down tomato planters, beans, peppers, many herbs, composter (rat-free, this time, we hope), rain barrel, and lots of native plants, aimed at encouraging insects - I believe that it is significant that I don't see this replicated much, if at all, in my neighbourhood. In Toronto, we have a very long way to go compared with Havana, Cuba, and The Walrus can help us along the way. Please think about supporting it.

Dawn R. Bazely

PS Update in September 2010 - I just renewed my Walrus subscription AGAIN and gave it as gift to Annette Dubreuil

Posted in: Blogs | IRIS Director Blog

Can blogging be sustainable?

Published by

Published May 17, 2009

by dbazely

It's about a year since I last blogged.  When we got the new IRIS website up and running, it was great fun to learn about blogging, but it actually took a lot of time to write and fact-check serious blogs (as opposed to simply churning out drivel).  It's been a challenge to get people associated with IRIS to commit to blogging and to sustain it.  This challenge has given me insight into why social networking sites such Facebook, and the sms-driven Twitter, are so appealing.  Having said that, while you CAN post to these sites really quickly, I also think that far too many people (including members of my family and a lot of students and older people that I know) spend far too much time on these sites; there is a very addictive quality about them.

My issue with finding time for blogging, is that, not only do I have lots of "Administrative Duties" (around here, the Director is as likely to be taking out the trash as to be schmoozing with VIPs), but I also lead active field-based research projects, supervise graduate students, write papers and book, carry out peer-review for journals and governments, and serve on many external bodies - plus I have children (teenagers need as much time and attention as toddlers) and a husband who is on the road a lot.  So, my blogging about sustainability had to be sidelined.  But, no more - I have decided that I will be doing less intensive and more twitter-like blogging, that is much more frequent.  Why?  Because a large part of my job is about being a Connector in a Gladwellian, Tipping Point, sense. The more that I participate in sustainability-related conversations, the more I have come to realize that many concerned people remain hugely unaware of many important issues that relate directly to their concern about sustainability. Additionally, because IRIS is about sustainability in an academic setting, IRIS members - including myself - are also Mavens or information specialists (again, see The Tipping Point).  For example, my research on why many forests in southern Ontario are falling down and are NOT sustained forest ecosystems, is producing new information and knowledge (see photos of Rondeau Provincial Park, and the low density of trees, due to deer browsing on the twigs of saplings, resulting in long-term mortality of high woody species i.e. trees).

So - as a professor, who cannot resist giving homework - today's assigned reading is Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point - but if you don't have time, the Wikipedia page on this one is just fine.

Dawn Bazely

 

Posted in: Blogs | IRIS Director Blog

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