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People in the News

On World Environment Day, World Scouting receives recognition for its support to Clean Up the World

Thierry Tournet

World Scout Bureau Inc., July 2010

In the Clean up the World Report for 2009, World Scouting receives recognition for its support to Clean up the World (CUW). CUW works in partnership with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and in its Global Activity Report, launched to support World Environment Day on 5 June, WOSM is recognised as a key 'Ally'. Scout activities are highlighted in the report. READ MORE

Reducing Paper Use

Cynthia Macdonald

University of Toronto Magazine, Summer 2010

For most of us, recycling paper has become automatic: we hurl those scrunched-up balls into the recycling bin and not the garbage can. But in doing so, are we really doing enough for the environment?

“Recycling requires energy, and it’s also associated with pollution,” says Elah Feder (MSc 2007), the co-ordinator of a major paper conservation effort at the St. George Campus. “So that’s something that we really want to emphasize – it’s reduce first, recycle after.”

At the Gerstein Science Information Centre, the printers now print on both sides of the page. “Just that will save up to 100,000 sheets a year,” marvels Isaac Muise, a fourth-year environment and resource management student who’s implementing the library component of the paper reduction program by trying out new ideas at Gerstein. “We’re also going to put instructions on photocopiers so that people can print double-sided, and set up paper reuse stations, which is kind of like a ‘take a penny, leave a penny’ situation.”

READ MORE

Chimps with everything: Jane Goodall's 50 years in the jungle

Robin McKie

The Observer, June 27, 2010

Fifty years ago, a slender young Englishwoman was walking through a rainforest reserve at Gombe, in Tanzania, when she came across a dark figure hunched over a termite nest. A large male chimpanzee was foraging for food. So she stopped and watched the animal through her binoculars as he carefully took a twig, bent it, stripped it of its leaves, and finally stuck it into the nest. Then he began to spoon termites into his mouth. READ MORE

Belinda Stronach on why girls need their own summit

Jill Mahoney

Globe and Mail , May 31, 2010

Before the world’s most powerful leaders swoop into Toronto for the G20 meeting, young women from around the globe will already have a head start hashing out the issues that matter most to them.

G(irls)20 Summit, a meeting of 21 girls from around the world, will gather June 15 to 18 at the University of Toronto to discuss and raise awareness of the most pressing issues that affect girls and women internationally.

Hosted and run by The Belinda Stronach Foundation, established by businesswoman and former politician Belinda Stronach, G(irls)20 has begun unveiling its delegates this week. Ms. Stronach talked to The Globe about why girls need a summit to call their own.

Where did the idea for the G(irls)20 Summit come from?

I established a foundation two years ago now and one of our key pillars is to improve the lives of girls and women around the globe. So in order to develop a strategy for this, to get further input in what we wanted to do, we gathered together young, influential media personalities in various areas – so from print to television, radio – a bunch of women. We got together and we had an informal dinner one night for several hours and we talked about what could we do in advance of the G8/G20 to create awareness about the challenges that young women and women around the globe face, but also … do something about it, try to develop solutions.  READ MORE

Farmers Restore Forests

Soumaïla T. Diarra

IPS, May 7, 2010

Villagers in the interior delta of the Niger River, already experiencing the harsh impacts of climate change, have a good understanding of the need to restore forests decimated by drought. Where forest cover has been rehabilitated, it is already reshaping the surrounding environment - and economy.

"It is important to set regulations to protect the restored forests against fresh destruction by drought," Yaya Bocoum, an elder from the Malian village of Youwarou, told IPS.

"I can still remember how people once feared wild animals such as lions and hyenas that lived in the woods surrounding their homes. We did not dare venture outside the villages at dusk."

The forest that was home to those animals in the 40,000 square kilometre delta was hard hit by drought in the 1970s and 1980s.

"There were over twenty forests in the delta that were important to local communities and animals. They have completely disappeared," says researcher Mory Diallo. Diallo is a research assistant at the local office of Wetlands International, a non-governmental organisation based in Holland. READ MORE

Environment can suffer amid panic of a film set,

says actor Colin Firth

The Canadian Press, April 26, 2010

TORONTO — It's not easy being green on a film set, says Colin Firth. "It's a wasteful place," admits the Oscar-nominated actor. "It is not ... because film people are free of conscience and they don't care about the planet. It's a very panic-stricken environment a lot of the time." Firth says there are people in the film industry who will do anything to get a take on time. "You get directors who say, 'Make the kid cry, get the scene right,"' he says with a laugh. "Things get wasted, thrown away, replaced. Whole sets go to landfill. Food gets laid out for the banquet scene and sprayed so it looks good but you can't touch it or eat it.  READ MORE

Jane Goodall looks back – and forward

Q&A

by Sarah Boesveld

The Globe and Mail , April 8, 2010

Fifty years ago, people laughed when a sprightly 26-year-old Jane Goodall went to the wilds of Africa to study chimps. There was no money for what she remembers her doubters calling a “crazy” expedition to learn from the human-like creatures in the Tanzanian parks. But her breakthrough observation that they could make and use tools just like chimps in captivity was an epiphany that would change the way scientists studied hot-blooded animals. Today, her work helping others to understand chimpanzees has expanded to become something of a social empire. She’s honed in on youth, motivating them to make social and environmental change through Roots & Shoots and other programs with the Jane Goodall Institute of Canada and in more than 100 other countries. She’s working on yet another book, this one about plants, and a documentary about her called Jane’s Journey is scheduled for release in the fall. READ MORE

Guerrilla Gardener Seen Planting Up Close and Personal

by Bonnie Alter

Treehugger , March 22, 2010

The London Leaders programme was developed by the London Sustainable Development Commission. Each year the programme selects 15 people who are well respected in their fields and willing to commit themselves to a personal project that will make London a more sustainable city. This year Reynolds is one of the leaders. His project is called " Pimp Your Pavement" which is all about "encouraging more people to take responsibility for a very local patch of their community by focusing on the opportunities of a space that's very immediate, very manageable, very sociable and yet sadly overlooked." To that end he was in the east end of London, along with the local residents, planting sedum, primula, thrift and bee-loving lavender in this regenerated area. The residents had pushed for the newly paved "piazza" and the adjacent pub is committed to watering the new flower beds. Read more

Disaster Experts Praise Chile Quake Response

by The Associated Press

The New York Times , March 10, 2010

President Michelle Bachelet leaves office Thursday with a chunk of her country in ruins -- and her popularity in the clouds.

Despite complaints that aid was slow to reach the hungry and homeless, experts say Chile's response to one of history's most powerful earthquakes has been a model for disaster recovery.

At first, the problems were all too obvious: Chile's navy and emergency preparedness office failed to issue a tsunami warning that might have saved hundreds of lives after the Feb. 27 quake, and Bachelet didn't order soldiers to impose order in the streets until after looting had spun out of control.

But experts say other smart moves -- like insisting that foreign help meet specific needs, quickly patching up roads and having the military handle logistics -- made it possible to deliver 12,000 tons of relief in just 10 days. Read more

Uncontacted Amazon Tribes get Internet Connection

by Stephen Messenger

Treehugger , March 1, 2010

For the first time, indigenous Amazonian tribesmen, long isolated by their location deep within the rainforest, will have access to the internet and telephone. The system, which includes a VSAT satellite dish, was installed by the System of Protection of the Amazon (SIPAM) to enable a closer monitoring of illegal logging operations. Up until now, indigenous tribes were aware of deforestation taking place on protected land but had little recourse to combat the problem--now they can twitter about it instantaneously. SIPAM reports that the two main tribes in the region, the Kawahara and Piripkura of central Brazil, are pleased with their new connectivity. Read More

Jane Goodall: 'There is no problem in having empathy'

by Charlotte Uhlenbroek

NewScientist, February 24, 2010

Half a century after Jane Goodall began studying chimpanzees in Tanzania, she talks to her former student Charlotte Uhlenbroek about chimpanzee fire-dancing, the peril of bushmeat and the empowerment of local people

"EVERYBODY studying animals in the wild today needs to be aware of the need for conservation and involving local people. It's rather unfair because when I began my study there were probably over a million wild chimps and the equatorial forest belt stretched across Africa - I was very lucky to be able to concentrate purely on research."

Jane Goodall is sitting in the corner of a cafe at Heathrow airport in the UK. I have managed to grab an hour of her time between a radio interview and her flight to Munich, Germany. Although Goodall became world famous through her long-term study of chimpanzees in Gombe National Park in Tanzania, these days she is on the road some 300 days of the year, rushing between meetings with top politicians, star-studded fund-raisers and remote African villages in a bid to save chimpanzees and their forests. "I am not doing any research at all. I can't even do any analysis, there's no time," she says with regret. Read more

Cuba: Women Knitting for Change

by Dalia Acosta (havana)

Inter Press Service, February 05, 2010

A neighbour started calling Andrea del Sol 'Perseverance,' and the name stuck. Since 1998, she and a small group of women from Alamar, on the outskirts of the Cuban capital, have been throwing their combined energies behind a common purpose: 'changing things.'

They faced plenty of difficulties, such as finding a space where they could meet, creating a library and cleaning up the surroundings. But all these needs were easy to fill compared with the daily gender violence that is the norm in Cuba's foremost dormitory town.

'People from more than 57 municipalities around the country live in my area. Everyone has their own customs, roots and religion, and this is something to bear in mind when conflict situations arise,' del Sol, who has lived in East Alamar for 20 years, told IPS. Read more

Traditional aboriginal knowledge is critical to conservation

by David Suzuki with Faisal Moola

Cnews, February 3, 2010

The United Nations has declared 2010 the International Year of Biodiversity. It would be great if the year could be simply a celebration of the Earth’s biological richness, but Biodiversity Year is occurring while non-human life on our planet is in a more perilous state than ever before.

Experts believe the world is in the midst of a biodiversity crisis on par with earlier mass extinction events. Some 17,000 of the plant and animal species that we’ve identified and assessed are now in serious decline, including many that are well-known and well-loved by Canadians, such as caribou, polar bears, and some salmon populations.

This perilous situation for plants and animals threatens not only the ecological health of ecosystems like old-growth forests and arctic tundra but also the wellbeing and welfare of human communities that depend on the ecological goods and services that nature provides. The deep bio-cultural ties to the land and its resources, especially wild plants, that many of Canada’s aboriginal people have long held offer a direct illustration of this, as well as a source of knowledge that can benefit everyone. Read more

Haiti: Two Competing Aid Approaches

By Supriyo Chatterjee

ZNet, January 26, 2010

The first aid aircraft to reach the Port-au-Prince airport in Haiti, within 14 hours of the devastation, was Venezuelan, with a search and rescue team. Almost immediately afterwards, they drove to a disaster site and pulled out four women alive. And then came the Americans.

Two very different visions of disaster aid and reconstruction are playing out in Haiti. Manuel Medina, a Caracas fire officer who was part of the first Venezuelan team, spoke of his country’s “historical debt” to Haiti. In 1815, President Alexandre Sabes Petion gifted Simon Bolivar hundreds of elite fighters, ships, arms, money and a printing press at a time Venezuela’s liberator was down and out. Now, Haiti and Venezuela have agreed on setting up a Petion-Bolivar Solidarity Brigade to focus on the country’s reconstruction. Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela’s Foreign Minister, said his country had no intention of occupying Haiti: “our deployment is that of solidarity, not of military force”. Read more

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