Eco-Theatre Launch October 29th! All welcome!!

Eco Theatre Group looking for community engagement.

Opportunity: The Urquhart Butterfly Garden Summer Education Series

Hi Everyone!
Here is a great opportunity you don't want to miss:

Urquhart Butterfly Garden Summer Education Series

Free Public Education Workshops
This summer, Urquhart Butterfly Garden is offering a Summer Education series!

Sunday, August 11, 2pm: Restoring Cootes: Restoration projects around the mouth of the Spencer Creek

Thursday, August 15, 6pm: Exploring Medicinal Herbs

Thursday August 22, 6pm: Working with Nature: An introduction to chemical free gardening

Sundy, August 25, 2pm: Learning Dragonflies and Damselflies

Thursday, September 5, 6pm: History of the Desjardins Area and the UBG

Thursday, September 12, 6pm: A Discussion with the Hamilton Urban Beekeepers

Thursday, September 19, 6pm: Protecting the Monarch Butterfly

Thursday, September 26, 6pm: Insect Identification

Guided Nature Walks at Urquhart Butterfly Garden

Saturday August 3rd at 11am the Urquhart Butterfly Garden will be holding 'Free Guided Butterfly & Bird Identification Walks ' at the Garden.  Join naturalist Matthew Mills to discover the diversity of life at the Garden.
The Urquhart Butterfly Garden is located in Centennial Park at the corner of Cootes Drive and East Street North, and is easily accessible by bus or bike. Parking is available adjacent to the Air Force Club off King Street East. Hikes will convene under the trees immediately in front of the parking lot. Look for signs.

The guided walks begin on Saturday August 3rd, at 11am, and continue at the same time every second Saturday in August and September. If there is rain the guided walk  will be cancelled.  More details online at www.urquhartbutterfly.com. 

For more information, contact Joanna Chapman – 905-627-8917

email:  jchapman@295.ca

Reading list: Environmental Literature

An Annotated Bibliography

of

Environmental Literature

By Richard Reble-Volunteer 

             

To broaden your awareness about the need for a new environmental ethic, about the social and environmental pressures impacting us globally, and about the appropriate responses they demand from us, here is an annotated bibliography of environmental literature. Please use it to help guide your reading. The works included are suitable for beginners but will likely have appeal to academics as well. The list will be frequently updated. If you have read works you think should be added to the list, please add to comments.

            The following books are listed alphabetically by author or, in the case of multiple books by the same author, by date of publication from oldest to most recent. Each title is accompanied by an author quote that best reflects the central theme of the book:

Diamond, Jared, Collapse, 2005, Penguin Books.

ISBN  0-670-03337-5

ISBN  0 14 30.3655 6

Author quote: “Are the parallels between the past and present sufficiently close that the collapse of the Easter Islanders, Anasazi, Maya, and Greenland Norse could offer any lessons for the modern world?....It is not a question for open debate whether the collapses of past societies have modern parallels and offer any lesson to us. That question is settled, because such collapses have actually been happening recently, and others appear to be imminent. Instead, the real question is how many more countries will undergo them….Today’s larger population and more potent destructive technology, and today’s interconnectedness (pose) the risk of a global rather than a local collapse….If we don’t make a determined effort to solve (the problems) facing us, the world as a whole within the next few decades will face a declining standard of living, or perhaps something worse.”

Flannery, Tim, The Weather Makers, 2005, Harper Collins Publishers Ltd.

ISBN  13: 978-0-00-200751-1

ISBN  10: 0-00-200751-7

Author quote: “(This) is my best effort, based on the work of thousands of colleagues, to outline the history of climate change, how it will unfold over the next century, and what we can do about it….The best evidence indicates that we need to reduce our CO2 emissions by 70% by 2050….The transition to a carbon-free economy is eminently achievable because we have all the technology we need to do so. It is only a lack of understanding and the pessimism and confusion generated by special interest groups that is stopping us from going forward.”

Gore, Al, An Inconvenient Truth, 2006, Rodale Books, Emmaus, Pennsylvania.

ISBN  13: 978-1-59486-567-1

ISBN  10: 1-59486-567-1

Author quote: “ I have learned that, beyond death and taxes, there is at least one absolutely indisputable fact: Not only does human-caused global warming exist, but it is also growing more and more dangerous, and at a pace that has now made it a planetary emergency….The climate crisis …offers us the chance to experience what very few generations in history have had the privilege of knowing: a generational mission; the exhilaration of a compelling moral purpose; a shared and unifying cause; the thrill of being forced by circumstances to put aside the pettiness and conflict that so often stifle the restless human need for transcendence; the opportunity to rise.”

Heinberg, Richard, Power Down, 2004, New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, B.C.

ISBN  0-86571-510-6

Author quote: “….the purpose of this book is not to provide yet another cheerful manual on how to save the world. But neither is it my goal to helplessly bemoan our inevitable collective fate. Rather, it is my goal to explore realistically our options for the next century. When I say ‘realistically’, I mean that I take as my starting point the belief, arrived at reluctantly after years of reflection and study, that we have already advanced so far in certain directions as to have foreclosed possibilities that we would all prefer were available….I take it as a given that we have already overshot Earth’s long-term carrying capacity for humans and that some form of societal collapse is now inevitable.” 

Homer-Dixon, Thomas, The Ingenuity Gap, 2001, Vintage Canada (division of Random House of Canada Ltd.

ISBN  0-676-97296-9 Gore, Al, An Inconvenient Truth, 2006, Rodale Books, Emmaus, Pennsylvania.

Author quote: “In this book I’ll argue that the complexity, unpredictability, and pace of events in our world, and the severity of global environmental stress, are soaring. If our societies are to manage their affairs and improve their well-being they will need more ingenuity – that is, more ideas for solving their technical and social problems. But societies, whether rich or poor, can’t always supply the ingenuity they need at the right times and places. As a result, some face an ingenuity gap: a shortfall between their rapidly rising need for ingenuity and their inadequate supply….There is still time, I believe, to muster the ingenuity and the will, but the hour is late.”

Homer-Dixon, Thomas, The Upside of Down, 2006, Alfred A. Knoph, Canada.

ISBN  13: 978-0-676-97722-6

ISBN  10: 0-676-97722-7

Author quote:  “These days, lots of people have the intuition that the world is going haywire and an extraordinary crisis is coming….I think that the non-experts’ intuition is actually largely right. Some kind of real trouble does lie ahead. That trouble doesn’t have to be calamitous in its ultimate results, though. If we’re smart and a bit lucky, we have a good chance of avoiding a terrible outcome….Catastrophe could create a space for creativity that helps us build a better world for our children, our grandchildren, and ourselves.”

Jacobs, Jane, Eark Age Ahead, 2005, Vintage Canada (a division of Random House of Canada).

ISBN  0-679-31310-9

Author Quote: “A culture is unsalvageable if stabilizing forces themselves become ruined and irrelevant. This is what I fear for our own culture, and why I have written this cautionary book in hopeful expectation the time remains for corrective actions….I single out five pillars of our culture that we depend on to stand firm, and discuss what seem to me ominous signs of their decay….These five jeopardized pillars are: community and family, higher education, the effective practice of science and science-based technology, taxes and governmental powers directly in touch with needs and possibilities, and self-policing by the learned professions.”

Kingsolver, Barbara, Small Wonder, Harper-Collins Publishers Inc., New York, N.Y.

ISBN  0-06-050407-2

Author quote: “There must be limits, somewhere, to the human footprint on this earth. When the whole of the world is reduced to nothing but human product, we will have lost the map that can show us how we got here, and can offer our spirits an answer when we ask why. Surely we are capable of declaring sacred some quarters that dare not enter or possess.”

Kunstler, James Howard, The Long Emergency, 2005, Grove Press, New York, N.Y.

ISBN  10: 0-8021-4249-4

ISBN  13: 978-0-8021-4249-8

Author quote: “Above all and most immediately, we face the end of the cheap fossil fuel era….The American way of life, which is now virtually synonymous with suburbia, can run only on reliable sources of dependably cheap oil and gas. Even mild to moderate deviations in either price or supply will crush our economy and make the logistics of daily life impossible….I believe that we face a dire and unprecedented period of difficulty in the twenty-first century, but that humankind will survive and continue further into the future, though not without taking some severe losses in the meantime, in population, in life expectancies, in standards of living, in the retention of knowledge and technology, and in decent behaviour. I believe we will see a dramatic die-back, but not a die-off.”

Lovelock, James, The Revenge of Gaia, 2007, Penguin Books, London, England.

ISBN  978-0-141-02597-1

Author quote: “Humanity, wholly unprepared by its humanist traditions, faces its greatest trial. The acceleration of the climate change now under way will sweep away the comfortable environment to which we are adapted….The prospects are grim, and even if we act successfully in amelioration, there will still be hard times, as in any war, that will stretch us to the limit. We are tough and it would take more than the predicted climate catastrophe to eliminate all the breeding pairs of humans; what is at risk is civilization….There is a small chance that the skeptics are right, or we might be saved by an unexpected event such as a series of volcanic eruptions severe enough to block out sunlight and so cool the Earth. But only losers would bet their lives on such poor odds.”

Monbiot, George, Heat, 2006, Doubleday Canada (a division of Random House of Canada).

ISBN  13: 978-0-385-66221-5

ISBN  10: 0-385-66221-1

Author Quote: “This book has an overtly political purpose. It aims to encourage people not only to change the way they live but also to force their governments to make such changes easier….(A) ninety-four per cent (reduction in our use of fossil fuels) sounds like a ridiculous target, but I have sought in this book to show that, thanks to new technologies and a few cunning applications, it is compatible with the survival of an advanced industrial civilization.” 

Wilson, Edward, O., The Future of Life, 2003, Vintage Books.

ISBN  0-679-76811-4

Author quote: “Stretched to the limit of its capacity, how many people can the planet support? A rough answer is possible, but it is a sliding one contingent on three conditions: how far into the future the planetary support is expected to last, how evenly the resources are to be distributed, and the quality of life most of humanity expects to achieve….What humanity is inflicting on itself and Earth is, to use a modern metaphor, the result of a mistake in capital investment. Having appropriated the planet’s natural resources, we chose to annuitize them with a short-term maturity reached by progressively increasing payouts….Meanwhile, two collateral results of the annuitization of nature, as opposed to its stewardship, are settling in to beg our attention. The first is economic disparity: in relative terms the rich grow richer and poor poorer….The second collateral result, and the principal concern of the present work, is the accelerating extinction of natural ecosystems and species.”

Roberts, Paul, The End of Oil, 2004, a Mariner Book, Houghton Mifflin Company.

ISBN  0-618-56211-4

ISBN  0-618-56211-5 (pbk.)

Author quote: “We live today in a world completely dominated by energy….It is the bedrock of our wealth, our comfort, and our largely unquestioned faith in the inexorability of progress, implicit in every act and artifact of modern existence….Yet even a cursory look reveals that, for all its great successes, our energy economy is fatally flawed, in nearly every respect. The oil industry is among the least stable  of all business sectors….Worse, it is now clear….that our steadily increasing reliance on fossil fuels is connected in some way to….significant changes in our climate….While climatologists and environmentalists fret about the quality of energy we produce, most other experts worry far more about the quantity of energy we can make and , more specifically, whether we can produce enough of any kind or quality to satisfy the world’s present and future needs.”

Simmons, Matthew R., Twilight in the Desert, 2005, John Wiley and Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

ISBN  13: 978-0-471-79018-1

ISBN  10: 0-471-79018-4

Author quote: “The book asserts that every oilfield, whether super-giant or ordinary, will begin to decline at some reasonably predictable time. The risk that the oil-consuming world faces is that Saudi Arabia’s oilfields will begin declining sooner rather than later….Given reasonable political stability, world oil production will not plummet, but fade gradually through a twilight. Unfortunately, the world economy is not synchronized to the principles of petroleum geology. A growing gap between energy supply and demand will cause acute, convulsive disruption greatly disproportionate to the actual size of the shortfall.”

------------------------

Here's another one:

Sea Sick: The Global Ocean in Crisis by Alanna Mitchell

Meeting Notes for EHYN: April 25th.

EHYN Meeting Notes
Thursday, April 25

1. Mission Statement Amendments

- a network: allow people to have support, feel like they’re “not the only voice”, working alone
- projects: raise awareness (through the 3 schools: Westdale, Westmount and Ancaster High)
- a directory/database (online; get someone with experience programming)
- present to high schools, recruit “reps”

What do we want?
- acquire leadership skills
- connections with community events and schools
- more opportunities to be a part of environmental initiatives outside of school
- unpaid interships (co-op)
- working groups (“if you’re interested in ________, come to _________”)
- education: people (youth) who want to do something, but don’t know how or where
- get out into nature! (lead hikes, etc.)

2. A Launch

- a competition (photography, visual arts, etc.) **competition = prizes = incentive
- exhibition to display work

Misc.
- Ontario co-op
- “Sing for a Cause”
- engage elementary school students

Things to work towards
1. Finalize mission statement (work on that over the next month over email, blog, etc.)
2. Get started on creating this directory
3. Start seriously considering the launch

April- the month of eco-fairs!

Thanks to volunteer Natalie for helping out at the eco-fair a Sacred Heart of Jesus school april 02.

Our first Meeting: What we discussed

At our first networking meeting ever, we discussed our individual vision of an ideal city. Also, we talked about our goals for the network; what we hope that the network will offer; how we hope to support one another's projects, what resources we want to develop etc.
Thanks Ashley for pulling these notes together:

An Ideal City | EHYN

What is our ideal city?
•Ville-fleuré: a flowered city

•Gardens...gardens everywhere! Green everywhere! The picturesque of Nature.

•Exudes vibrancy; art (ex. Murals, graffiti, monuments, posters for local festivities, diversity in the streets)

•Co-ops: people, planet, profit; connected like a village

•Walkability- pedestrians are not confined to minuscule sidewalks

Youth Network
•Inclusive
•Connect youth from around Hamilton
•resources and connections
•an official launch-start with a bang!

How will be implement action to make this ideal city a reality in Hamilton?

Potential Outlets
•Create a census of all interested organizations.
•Conceptualize ideas from different organizations
•Connect representatives from different environmental groups to meet with EHYN
•Apply for funds on behalf of these groups

Mission Statement:
Become the central hub for all environment  groups, with an emphasis on those with youth involvement, within the city of Hamilton.

Goals Set on Premiere:
•Recruit more members via posters, announcements and word of mouth

Revwear; March 2nd

What an amazing turn out at revwear March 2nd. I was deeply impressed by how the message of sustainability is conveyed in a beautiful and broadly appealing, FUN way. The buzz was palpable.
Here's how the organizers of the event describe it:

The Revolution Wear (i.e.: RevWear) Fashion Show, is an annual multidisciplinary event combining wearable (eco) art, performance and experimental modes of expression to interrogate and explore creative solutions to environmental sustainability and social justice issues. The Fashion Show inspires and challenges the audience to “Create Change and Reuse Everything.”
The theme of the 10th anniversary show was “The People” and the celebration action by real individuals, projects and movements happening now in our region.
The kind of world we have designed, danced, choreographed, performed, spoken, composed, silk screened, and strut about for 10 years is more then just a dream. It is being weaved and lived into reality right now by the people in your neighbourhood.

Ten years and going strong-they must be doing something right!

Join the Environment Hamilton Youth Network

Eco-Theatre. You don't need to be an actor!

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Welcome to the Environment Hamilton Youth Network.

Dear Youth!
You must know that without your input, without your contribution, we are working at a greatly reduced capacity towards sustainability and environmental health for our communities. Simply put, we need you. We need your creativity, your energy, your strength, your vision. This world needs you.
That's why in Hamilton, we are creating the Environment Hamilton Youth Network. It's so that you can have your say; you can weigh in on the pressing ecological issues our community is facing. You can help us with the project and advocacy work we do. You can propose your own ideas and we can support you. When you join us, you will have the opportunity to develop your leadership skills and to be mentored by some of the top people in the movement. You will find a friendly and welcoming environment,  a place to learn and most of all a place that welcomes your contributions.