I went to the David Suzuki x Brandi Morin talk moderated by Naomi Klein earlier this term at the Chan Centre. One thing that stayed with me was Suzuki saying that he was able to "stay in the fight" his whole life by constantly taking action and surrounding himself with others interested in doing the same. ENVR430 has really helped me understand this sentiment. Apathy can be countered by speaking up for what we believe in, having those feelings and values validated, and taking action towards creating a world we want to live in. If we feel like we have movement, we feel hope. At the very start of the term, watching Brene Brown's The Call to Courage, we talked about vulnerability, and how one had to "step into the arena" if they wanted to be able to critique it. This class got us into the arena, and for that I'm very grateful. My final project experience gave me some novel insight into the activism world, and made me seriously consider those spaces as a future career or study trajectory–invaluable exposure! #UnleashValues

Does forgetting to cut your lawn for weeks on end count as rewilding? What about *not* hazing the coyotes that I regularly see biking home from school? In thinking about how to support more ecological integrity in urban spaces, I feel like there’s a whole bunch of everyday things that we can not intervene in to protect natural systems around us. I have a few colleagues and neighbours who are rewilding their lawns, which sometimes causes neighbourhood conflict (because the grass looks "messy"). But this is something we know promotes fantastic bird and insect biodiversity compared with Kentucky Bluegrass monocultures. It’s great to see certain parks in Vancouver do this too – the NW Marine Drive hill I bike past every day has a lovely wildflower meadow situation going on where a few years ago, it was just patchy bare grass. I want to see more cities and marks organizations engage on this. Our votes in municipal elections, and our own actions in the places we live, to promote increased ecological integrity in the places in which we live. @CoSphere #UnleashValues

Removing plastics is the first and most necessary step in improving environmental and personal health–I envision a world in which we don’t live under the threat of continuously escalating concentrations of endocrine disrupting chemicals in our food and water. It’s not about a sepia-toned bike messenger dressed in fair trade linen carrying farm to table $50 per kg cherry tomatoes enrobed in glass and twine. It’s about a mega change to the way that we do commerce. We could pass a whole suite of laws enabling us to effectively eliminate plastics from a huge majority of our packaging, and our lives, improving human and environmental health, and reducing our oil needs. The following are some policy-driven interventions that could occur at municipal, provincial, or federal levels: Design a payment system where receipts are linked to credit card accounts: no receipts, especially no BPA based ones (federal/bank driven). Dramatically widen and strengthen extended producer responsibility legislation, forcing companies. BC’s EPR legislation essentially asks producers to fund recycling programs, but there are several other ways of doing this that will be more effective: Tax non-reusable packaging: a per-kilo fee that is *high enough* that other options (such as container re-use) become at least as cost effective (federal/provincial) Mandate re-use programs in key industries: coca cola’s glass bottle collection program is a great demonstration of how we can remove millions of disposable containers from the system. The old school milk distribution system is another (municipal/provincial). Mandate that the weight of jars be printed on them: this would massively enable people to bring their own containers to bulk stores without having to go through the pre-weigh hassle (federal). #UnleashValues

Kai said in class that "the worst actors are invulnerable to almost every [non-legal] mechanism that we have". Well, where do we go from here? Legal restructuring of the finance system, I'd say. Within the economic structure that we live in, I really want to see corporations acting for public good, not for share holder profit–given I value people and the environment, and not wealth in the financial abstract. The Musk/Twitter sale was an interesting story to follow. Not putting Twitter on a pedestal, but they haven't tried to be a "take-over-the-world-and-make-trillions" company, and they have spent a lot of effort and money on content moderation, trying to ensure that users protesting authoritarian governments are not silenced. Musk buying Twitter is obviously bad for the company and probably bad for the world (Musk's acquisition hasn't exactly promoted high-quality and respectful public discourse). But the Twitter board still took Musk to court and forced him to buy the company when he tried to back out. Why? Shareholder responsibility. Public Twitter shareholders would have collectively lost millions if the sale had fallen through. This is a total dream, and I don't know much about finance, but what if: Legislators, along with the SEC, the CSA, and other securities transaction regulators, were able to come up with a financial structure that legally put shareholder responsibility behind some metrics for CSER and 'Public Good'? Then, publicly traded companies are responsible first to a body that monitors CSER, and second to shareholders–or maybe "nature" (thinking in a rights-based approach) is a shareholder. So, (i.e., upon bankruptcy or board-level decision making), companies would have to attend to or pay out "nature", or the CSER body, before other shareholders, ensuring that wealth winds up with the public, not in golden parachutes. I have no idea how you could quantify public good or create a CSER metric, or create a shareholder position for "nature"/"a clean environment". But...some sort of intervention into this structure might sorta/kinda be a neat idea :) #UnleashValues

It's astonishing how much freshwater we have in Canada. I lived in Western Cape, South Africa, during the Cape Town water crisis, and I was amazed how that scarcity mindset resulted in small lifestyle changes that radically reduced how much water I used. I wish we valued clean water more here, and recognized it as the limited resource it is. Dozens of reserve communities in Canada still have boil-water advisories. Iqaluit almost ran out of water this summer. Our reservoirs in Vancouver are hitting record lows at the end of the summer. I see this shift in values as necessary, even here. I think that paying for water is part of the solution. Kai's idea in class that residential water under a certain per-capita threshold should be free is essential to not cause massive societal issues. But even more important is charging industrial water users closer to what we pay as residential consumers. There was that famous deal with Nestle a few years ago - $2.25 per thousand cubic metres. Residents in Toronto pay double that for one cubic metre. Industrial water fees could easily offset all residential consumption. I would like to see this sort of legislation coupled with pollution legislation. A river in Canada (the Muteshekau Shipu) is now considered a person, and we should charge industrial polluters with harm akin to destroying a living being, not simply a reclamation fee. I say this even recognizing that most reclamation projects involve significant taxpayer funding anyways, which is also not right. I can imagine that amendments to CEPA might be the easiest way forward, at least with the latter part of this, to strengthen provisions which mandate industry responsibility over all (even accidental) pollution. #UnleashValues @CoSphere

I put my post on Instagram this week, but wanted to expand on it here because of the interesting responses I had. Following our in class discussion about the idea of reciprocity of nature being a form of justice, I posted the following on my Instagram with #UnleashValues. PLEASE DROP A COMMENT: I want to hear about the last time you felt like the world, nature, loved you. I know it’s in vogue to quote and/or invoke Robin Wall Kimmerer’s ideas but we were talking in class today about what a socially-ecologically just world could look like, and all I was thinking about was how nice it would be if I felt like nature, the world, loved me back. Maybe that means I’m looking for policy that forces environmental assessments to engage with stakeholders (especially Indigenous peoples) more meaningfully, or maybe I’m looking for legislation like the US’ Endangered Species Act…laws with teeth. Most of me wants to be outside all the time, cultivating that two-way relationship of love…but maybe I need to go to law school if I want to see this just relational order between humans and nature develop. Curious for your thoughts. I got quite a few responses from friends and family in BC but also Ontario, Czech Republic, and South Africa, which was cool to see. Here's what some people said. I think we need to be in nature and gardening to fully connect - I've felt healed by the soil when I'm planting. Yesterday when I harvested strawberries🍓 from the garden and whenever I'm...drinking clean water straight from the river. I feel cared for by creation / nature / the earth when I'm harvesting and enjoying produce from our garden, paddling in Algonquin, swimming in beautiful, clean, lakes... I admit to talking to the plants and trees as I cut and prune and thanking them I don’t think I perceive two-way love in the same way, but I do perceive a sort of rhyming/place-fitting and sense-making, especially when I’m in a place where I have a continuous relationship with the land. The sort of sense making, careful observation/attention that is the currency of love informs land relationships in the best case, I think. Riding my bike down the 8th Ave hill on Wednesday night feeling the wind and looking at the city lit up down below. Always is thrilling and always makes me feel like this is my home. What beautiful examples of love as social-ecological justice!!! I was so touched. There were a few trends in the responses: based on the examples of using our bodies (cycling, paddling) to travel, drinking natural water, gardening and eating food produced from the land, it seems to me that people find love of nature when they are participating in it. So how does this participation translate into a movement, or systemic change? Though not all of us can ride bikes or access land to garden, we can do things from a policy perspective to enable people to seek time with nature in a way that they find meaningful. We can fund organizations that provide opportunities for people to get outside. We can fight for policy that manages land in ways that doesn't result in industrial use/transformation of wild spaces. We can fight for laws that protect nature – giving SARA more teeth, giving legal rights to nature. We could develop tools to enforce honest advertising and fight green-washing, so that consumer choice supports sustainable brands, not green marketing. But advocacy is difficult, and we all need experiences that help us relax, and remind us what we're advocating for – we all need experiences which make us feel loved by nature.