too long for a tweet, too short for a blog post...
Saw this as I was walking through Waterloo Town Square last night with Nick Petten.
More info http://earthhourcanada.org/earthhour/ If you're in the Toronto area this Saturday, check out Earth Hour presented by the Young Social Entrepreneurs of Canada, featuring David Bornstein, Nathaniel Whittmore & Tonya Surman http://revisionearthhourtoronto.eventbrite.com
This is perhaps THE most compelling video showcasing the urgent need for collective action on climate change that I have come across to date.
Courtesy www.euronews.net
"In 1998, scientists predicted that the Chacaltaya glacier above La Paz would have completely disappeared by 2015. Now experts say it will already be gone completely early this year.
The 2 million residents of the city of La Paz and its suburb El Alto depend on the surrounding glaciers for some of their water needs. El Alto has expanded from 220,000 residents in 1985 to almost one million today, increasing the demand for water. Half the electricity of the country is also produced from hydro-power, meaning the lack of rain and disappearance of glaciers may create an energy crisis in the future when the glaciers have gone.
Final text of the Copenhagen Accord 2009
From the guardian.co.uk - December 21, 2009
We're all eco-warriors now after world leaders failed us at Copenhagen
What did the UN climate change talks in Copenhagen achieve? Our governments failed to agree a deal which might have avoided a global catastrophe. They did nothing but take yet another "important first step". We've had nearly two decades of those.
It's likely that Copenhagen is a long-term disaster for the planet and its people, but it might have another, more immediate consequence for you right now. Your moral obligations might have just changed dramatically. In situations like the one we're in now, the demand for action shifts from our leaders to us. They missed what might have been our last chance to take to take concerted, worldwide action on climate change, so the rest of us have to do something about it. Their failure means that we're all eco-warriors now.
The Builder's Manifesto
Umair Haque, over at the Harvard Business Review, has an excellent post titled The Builder's Manifesto, that speaks directly to the article from The Guardian above. It is certainly worth reading.
It seems that in order to tackle the most complex of social problems that we face in our world today, we don't need more leaders... we need builders.
Excerpt from The Builder's Manifesto below (bold emphasis mine):
What leaders "lead" are yesterday's organizations. But yesterday's organizations — from carmakers, to investment banks, to the healthcare system, to the energy industry, to the Senate itself — are broken. Today's biggest human challenge isn't leading broken organizations slightly better. It's building better organizations in the first place. It isn't about leadership: it's about "buildership", or what I often refer to as Constructivism.
Leadership is the art of becoming, well, a leader. Constructivism, in contrast, is the art of becoming a builder — of new institutions. Like artistic Constructivism rejected "art for art's sake," so economic Constructivism rejects leadership for the organization's sake — instead of for society's.
Builders forge better building blocks to construct economies, polities, and societies. They're the true prime movers, the fundamental causes of prosperity. They build the institutions that create new kinds of leaders — as well as managers, workers, and customers.
(I took these photos in the following cities: Banff, Elora, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver, Victoria and Waterloo)
The question of what it means to be Canadian has always been intriguing to me, given my background as a person born in the Philippines to Filipino parents, raised in the UAE from the age of five to high school graduation at seventeen, and who decided to come to Canada by myself (with the financial help of parents of course) on the basis that tuition fees for international students was much cheaper in Canada compared to the United States.
That was a number of years ago, and I am glad to have obtained my Canadian citizenship earlier this year. Early in our relationship, I used to tell Monika that the only reason I was dating her was to expedite the process of getting my Canadian papers. Jokingly of course.
It certainly makes a difference having a Canadian passport especially when traveling. Even more so when going across the border into the US. I remember having to wait hours at the border to get my fingerprints taken and eyes scanned, simply by virtue of traveling on a Filipino passport and a 10 year multiple-entry US visa. When traveling elsewhere, the reaction has almost always been positive when I mention that I am from Canada.
Copenhagen 2009
That is why when it comes to the issue of the environment, it saddens me to see that Canada is now to climate change, what Japan is to whaling.
WIth the Copenhagen talks set to take place next week, the impression that the current Canadian government will do everything in its power to wreck the talks reflects very poorly on Canadians, especially since this is incongruent with the movement building and gaining momentum in Canada right now, especially among young people.
Although the minority Harper government has used stalling tactics to delay a vote on Bill C-311 (Climate Change Accountability Act), an act to ensure Canada assumes its responsibilities in preventing dangerous climate change, parliament passed a motion last week that was supported by all three opposition parties, that Canada adopt the first target from the delayed Bill C-311 as its position in Copenhagen.
That, in the opinion of the House, Canada should commit to propose at the Copenhagen conference on climate change
- reducing, through absolute reduction targets, greenhouse gas emissions in industrialized countries to 25% lower than 1990 levels, by 2020;
- the necessity of limiting the rise in global temperatures to less than 2oC higher than in the preindustrial era; and
- supporting the developing countries in their efforts to reduce greenhouse gases and adapt to climate change.
Unlike Bill C-311, this motion is not legally binding. However, this does send a powerful message to other countries and world leaders involved with the Copenhagen talks, that the current Canadian government's position on climate change does not represent the majority view of the Canadian people.
To end on a lighter note, below is an email forward that I received from a friend this morning, that helped to spark this blog post, along with the accompanying photos taken in various Canadian cities over the years, that I feel helps to capture the diversity of the Canadian landscape (or at least the places in Canada that I have visited). I am also looking forward to attending the Guelph Lecture on Being Canadian next week, featuring John Ralston Saul, considered to be one of Canada's foremost political and economic thinkers. This lecture will certainly help to put what it means to be Canadian into perspective.
An Australian’s Definition of a Canadian
You probably missed it in the local news, but there was a report that someone in Pakistan had advertised in a newspaper an offer of a reward to anyone who killed a Canadian - any Canadian.
An Australian dentist wrote the following editorial to help define what a Canadian is, so they would know one when they found one:
“A Canadian can be English, or French, or Italian, Irish, German, Spanish, Polish, Russian or Greek. A Canadian can be Mexican, African, Indian, Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, Australian, Iranian, Arab, Pakistani or Afghan.
A Canadian may also be a Cree, Métis, Mohawk, Blackfoot, Sioux, or one of the many other tribes known as native Canadians.
A Canadian’s religious beliefs range from Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu or none. In fact, there are more Muslims in Canada than in Afghanistan. The key difference is that in Canada they are free to worship as each of them chooses. Whether they have a religion or no religion, each Canadian ultimately answers only to God, not to the government, or to armed thugs claiming to speak for the government and for God.
A Canadian lives in one of the most prosperous lands in the history of the world. The root of that prosperity can be found in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms which recognize the right of each person to the pursuit of happiness.
A Canadian is generous and Canadians have helped out just about every other nation in the world in their time of need, never asking a thing in return.
Canadians welcome the best of everything: the best products, the best books, the best music, the best food, the best services and the best minds. But they also welcome the least - the oppressed, the outcast and the rejected.
These are the people who built Canada .
You can try to kill a Canadian if you must as other blood-thirsty tyrants in the world have tried, but in doing so you could just be killing a relative or a neighbor. This is because Canadians are not a particular people from a particular place. They are the embodiment of the human spirit of freedom. Everyone who holds to that spirit, everywhere, can be a Canadian.”
(above diving photos courtesy of Jobelle Nepomuceno, taken in the Philippines)
Following my citizenship test yesterday morning, I spent most of the afternoon working on the December issue of SiG@Waterloo's monthly e-newsletter which went out this morning.
(Click here to see archives of past issues. You can also subscribe to SiG@Waterloo's monthly e-newsletter on the main page of our website)
For the Reflections piece this month, my colleague Sam Laban found a quote that I felt was appropriate to include given the upcoming Studio | Earth event that we will be hosting in mid-January 2009.
"Since any economy is a relationship between people and the earth, it is time to commit to learning to live like we plan on staying here." - Stephen Huddart, J.W. McConnell Family Foundation
Across Canada and around the world, there is certainly a growing movement towards creating sustainable environmental change (see the video below as an example) and when Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google has this to say about the environment as recently as November:
"When you do the math you discover the right thing [for the environment] is [also] the right thing for business,"
you know that you are doing something right.
With Eric Schmidt now playing a role as a member of Obama's Transition Economic Advisory Board, it will be interesting to see how much of Google's Clean Energy 2030 plan will play in shaping US domestic policy on energy, the environment and the economy for the next four (perhaps eight?) years.
***
Watch the video below on emerging thoughts on sustainability education in Canada produced by the J.W. McConnell Foundation.
As part of its continued support for sustainability education in Canada, the [J.W. McConnell| Foundation convened a meeting of field leaders in May 2008. Approximately fifty people from different organizations throughout Canada - representing education–sector organizations, teachers, youth-led non-governmental organizations, funders, academics, environmental activists and artists - came together to reflect on their own experiences and ideas surrounding the practice of Sustainability Education (SE).
