|
Our
Sustainability Blog
Wednesday 18 November 2009 –
Entry by Dr. David Galbraith, RBG’s Head of Science
Three Months and Counting
Our February 2010
symposium is now just three months away. There have been a few
technical hold-ups (inevitable) but we're nearly ready to "go
live" with registration on-line. My big job now is completing
re-building our web site, and adding all of the conference
functionality. We should be ready very shortly!
Friday 6 November 2009 –
Entry by Dr. David Galbraith, RBG’s Head of Science
An update to our Web Site
– Registration is Coming!
We’ve been
working flat out these past months to get ready for our February 2010
symposium. If you’ve visited these pages before you’ll see
a huge difference in the format of our pages. We’ve really
wanted a new look and better navigation to the fledgling CISB web
site. We hope you’ll like the new look, but this is also
considered tentative. Our work will be changing dramatically over the
coming year, and these web pages will reflect those changes.
Thursday 16 July 2009 - Entry by
Dr. David Galbraith, RBG's Head of Science
CISB Symposium
Pre-Registration Survey Goes Live!
In February 2010
we will be presenting the first CISB Symposium, "Living Plants,
Livable Communities: Exploring Sustainable Horticulture for the 21st
Century." We are still planning the event, and we are hoping
that everyone interested can help us by submitting their ideas. To
help with that process, we've set up an on-line survey on Zoomerang
that you can use to send us both your ideas and contact information.
As soon as we have the registration process ready, people who have
pre-registered will be contacted.
The on-line survey
and other information about our symposium can be reached by clicking here.
The 2010 symposium
is in many ways a successor to our very successful 2007 event
entitled "Shades of Green: Exploring Biodiversity, Human Values
and Urban Planning." The Shades of Green event was just an
afternoon, but it brought together three stimulating speakers and a
large audience, and all of our feedback from the event was that
people were hoping for more. We hope you can join us in 2010 for our
new event, and help us shape the future of horticulture in Canada.
Tuesday 7 July 2009 - Entry by
Dr. David Galbraith, RBG's Head of Science
Launching our Web Site Today
It's been two
years in the planning, and now we are launching our first web site
for the Canadian Institute for Sustainable Biodiversity!
This web launch
marks an important point in the development of the CISB, and we are
looking forward to your thoughts on how we can reach out to all of
Canada. We have plenty of ideas, but ideas are always better with
lots of voices around the table. Our first web pages are simple, but
we want to keep them that way - to not overwhelm the message with presentation.
Today is what
could be called a 'soft launch' - nothing fancy, just getting our
first web pages up and running.
We hope you will
participate in the CISB program. Over the coming weeks and months we
will be adding functionality to the web site, and more information on
how everyone can participate. In the mean time, if you'd like to
contact us, please do so!
Saturday 4 July 2009 - Entry by
Dr. David Galbraith, RBG's Head of Science
What is Sustainability Anyway?
Our world gets
more complex and crowded every day and connections to the natural
world more remote. A majority of our population lives in cities now -
a first in all of recorded history. Even those with regular access to
open spaces find their attention competing with the hustle and bustle
of daily life in a vibrant, growing economy. North Americans today
are exposed to over 5,000 advertising messages every day . It’s
been suggested that in our culture most people can identify over
1,000 corporate logos and slogans but fewer than 10 native plants
(the original source of this suggestion was American economist Paul
Hawken). We're flooded with messages and with priorities that take us
away from nature, and substitute purchased products for things we can
sometimes do ourselves.
Despite the
seminal importance of plants to our environment, few if any
environmental messages make direct connection to their roles as
cleaners of our air and water, sources of our raw materials, the
living fabric of our natural and rural landscapes, as sources of
inspiring beauty and the very basis for life itself. Contemporary
Canadian society is disconnected from the living world, and
especially from the world of plants. Although surrounded by plants in
managed and natural landscapes, and even in “interiorscaping
,” most Canadians are not equipped by experience or educational
opportunities with an understanding of how plants shape our daily
lives, how their exquisite ecological and evolutionary relationships
enrich the Canadian landscape, and how they are indisputably the
basis for a sustainable, healthy future for our children.
Taking a long
view, it's sometimes hard to see where it's all going. Our
decision-making processes often have a 3 or 5 year time frame - long
in political terms, perhaps, but a relatively short span in our own
lives and a "drop in the bucket" as far as the evolution of
life, or major ecological processes such as succession in natural
areas, goes.
Key challenges we
face at present are not being addressed. Of paramount importance is
adaptation to the changes we are facing because of climate change and
population growth. Our landscapes, home environments, gardens and
natural areas are experiencing change now and the effects are
expected to accelerate as temperature increases and precipitation
patterns alter. While Canadians are aware of the global implications
of climate change, how many have an appreciation of what changes can
now be predicted for their own gardens and neighborhoods, and how
they can adapt to the changes? As population growth, especially in
Southern Ontario, places more stress on municipal water supplies, how
can consumer choice be engaged to reduce demand and reduce peak
runoff? What choices can individuals and groups in Canada make that
contribute to the protection of our natural areas in the face of
growing global effects of invasive species?
Many people are
now bringing ideas forward under an overall, and potentially
confusing term, "sustainability." "Sustainable"
and "Sustainable Development" are terms that have come to
mean many things to many people. Sustainable development was largely
brought to peoples' attention by the Bruntland Commission report
"Our Common Future." That report defined sustainable
development as ensuring that the needs of the present generation can
be fulfilled without jeopardizing the abilities of future generations
to fulfill their needs. Although these terms have proven in some
senses problematic, and liable to appropriation and misuse, the core
sense of providing practical means to ensure that present human
activities are shaped so that they do not "mine out"
natural resources that would be truly renewable under better
management regimes, and that truly common resources such as the
atmosphere and oceans are neither polluted nor overexploited to the
point of sudden collapse.
Another useful
sense of sustainability has been expressed relative to human use of
natural systems, as "ecological sustainability." In the
recent book entitled "Gaining Ground: in search of ecological
sustainability" Dr. David Lavigne and his colleagues define this
as exploitation of natural systems managed in such a way as to ensure
rapid natural recovery following the cessation of use. Another way of
saying this is to keep the use of a natural biological resource from
removing so many individuals or so interfering with populations that
the viability of those populations is not threatened.
That may seem like
an academic sort of discussion, and I guess it is. The point is that
from urban design to manufacturing to landscapes and gardens, there
is a need to reconnect to nature, to be sure that what we do doesn't
overtax the ability of the natural systems of the earth - and even
those within cities and towns - to regenerate and support our
lifestyles. Similarly, our daily activities can often slow down, and
we can seen a way of living that is more "sustainable" in
personal and psychological terms.
Some people also
use the term to simply mean whether or not something can be continued
in the long term economically. This is an important sense of the term
sustainable, because if we are overspending our resources (whether
financial, natural or personal) we can't keep at it very long.
Bankruptcy results.
Royal Botanical
Gardens has created the Canadian Institute for Sustainable
Biodiversity to explore these issues, and most importantly, to help
Canadians achieve sustainable lifestyles in their homes and
landscapes, especially through the use of plants. We're setting out
on a exciting agenda, working at issues such as sustainable
horticulture, climate change and biodiversity, all under the overall
heading of the CISB. We hope you will be interested, support our
efforts, and participate. Our first big presentation under the
"CISB" banner will be a symposium on sustainable
horticulture being presented in February 2010 - fitting, as 2010 is
the UN's International Biodiversity Year.
Sources:
|
