If we are not careful...

Greener Side Celebration and Mill Pond Splash

With May bringing spring bird migration, blooming flowers, and pleasant temperatures, it's no wonder that nature festivals abound. I took my kids to Our Greener Side Celebration at the Kortright Centre for Conservation in Vaughan on May 28th, and the Mill Pond Splash on May 29th in Richmond Hill.

Highlights from the Mill Pond Splash included seeing some animals up close (including red tailed hawk, kestrel, and great horned owl), mural painting, walking along the pond, and getting a "grow your own butterfly" kit.

At Our Greener Side Celebration (the 3rd annual), my son discovered many creatures in the pond (the volunteers were fantastic!), we attended a Ontario wildlife show by Earth Rangers (see barn owl in photo), the pizza was incredible (local organic ingredients), sat in some electric vehicles, watched some entertaining musicians on stage. There was something for everyone, from crafts from reused materials to expert speakers to tours to a plethora of exhibitors. I hope even more people visit next year.

Nature festivals are a great way to enjoy our natural wonders with family and friends, come together as a community, and learn a thing or two about going greener. Another event coming up is the Carden Nature Festival from June 3 - 5, 2011.

They don't make 'em like they used to

Great toys are played with for months and even years. They engage the child's mind and imagination. And they get passed down for generations. I find nowadays, many toys are made of cheap plastic, shipped from China, require lots of batteries, and just don't have that sturdy and satisfying feel. They end up in the landfill too soon. My mom kept many of my toys from when I was a child, and my kids are now enjoying them.

Here's a list of some top kids toys

-Audubon birds by Wild Republic are stuffed plush birds that play their actually bird call when squeezed. Really cool.

-Grassroots store has some environmentally friendly toys and games

-wooden blocks

-wooden train set (planes, trains, and cars provide hours of enjoyment for my boys :)

-mini cars (the metal ones)

-books

-sports equipment

-art supplies (kids love playdough.. you can make your own)

-create-a-design with felt

-puppets

-tricycle (Noah loves taking his to the park)

Fisher price music box, c. 1980. Still works great, and no batteries!

Fun at the Zoo

Recently, I had a great time with my family at the Toronto Zoo. During the winter months, it's far less crowded (and the best time to go, in my opinion). But the best part is seeing the reactions of my kids to the incredible biodiversity that we are privileged to have and enjoy on this earth. Zoos do important work with conservation and education.

-S

Slow death by rubber duck

Earlier this year I heard a talk by Bruce Lowrie, co-author of Slow Death by Rubber Duck: How the Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Life Affects Our Health. It was really alarming to find out that all kinds of things in my home like hand soap, shower curtains, microwave popcorn bags, and even my son's squishy rubber duck are poisoning me and my family.

Here's an ad from 1946 about DDT, which was later banned in the US in 1972 because of it's harmful effects on the environment and human health. Most of us don't think twice about the products we use, but the reality is we don't know the effects from most of the chemicals they contain. Don't assume they are safe.. get educated.

When you go shopping for cosmetics or personal care products, read the labels and try to avoid these 7 ingredients:

Fragrance/Parfum - often contain phthalates, a group of man-made chemicals that disrupt hormones and can cause birth defects of male reproductive organs

Triclosan – an antimicrobial/antibacterial agent that can weaken the immune system, disrupt the hormonal system, bioaccumulate, and convert to chemicals known to cause cancer when being used

Sodium lauryl sulfate - a lathering agent in cleaners that is a known skin irritant and suspected liver toxin

DEA (Diethanolamine) - suspected of causing cancer and being toxic to the respiratory and nervous systems

Cyclomethicone and ingredients that include the word “siloxane” (e.g., cyclopentasiloxane) – these chemicals stick around in the environment for a long time, have the potential to accumulate in organisms up the food chain, and may cause cancer and reproductive toxicity

Ingredients that include the word “paraben” (e.g., methylparaben) – can cause skin irritation, may cause cancer and disrupt hormones

Ingredients that include the letter-combo “-eth-” (e.g., polyethylene glycol) – means that the product likely contains 1,4-dioxane, a chemical that may cause cancer and is a suspected kidney toxicant, neurotoxicant and respiratory toxicant

See the Guide to Less Toxic Products and Skin Deep for more information about toxicants in your products. The Environmental Working Group is a reliable source of information.

Wish List for Transforming the Planet (in a good way)

I attended a Going Greener forum last Thursday by the Council of Ontario Universities. It was inspiring to hear from people like Sandra Odendahl, director of corporate sustainability at Royal Bank of Canada. Here are a few points from her wish list.

• Price externalities (using the environment should not be free); still don’t have a real price on polluting, no price on carbon (still), no price on generating tons of packaging; it has a cost on the environment and someone should pay for it.
• Knowledgeable consumers: people have to make the link between stuff and pollution; everything you buy is going to be in a landfill someday; do you really need more stuff?
• Multidisciplinary education: Take your passion and embed it in your field that you work in; we need everybody to have a basic understand of how their lives impact the environment and it doesn’t matter what field you are in.

Minister of Environment John Wilkinson said that biggest thing that we can do as a government is to embed sustainability into the curriculum in all of our schools. It will be the young people who get us out of this mess we've created.

Here I am with my kids on the Oak Ridges Moraine Trail. Being out in nature engages all of our senses.

The beauty of autumn

(Hiking the King City trail system with my family on Thanksgiving weekend)

As a birdwatcher, photographer, and nature-lover, autumn is like a dream for me. Crimson, auburn, and golden hues are ablaze, a cool fresh breeze sweeps a flurry of leaves across my path as a breath in deeply. Ahhhh, I love autumn. A feeling of nostalgia hits me: I recall, as a child, pressing leaves between wax paper, and hiking a leaf-covered forest path, swishing beneath my feet. We have but 100 autumns to enjoy, if we’re lucky. Do you have your eyes closed to the beauty around you? One of the biggest legacies of our provincial goverment is the Greenbelt. Get outside and live it. Be like a three year old and discover your world again for the first time.

Who Grows Up Happier?

The kids in suburbs or the kids in the slums of Dhaka?

[photos from Adbusters magazine]

Wealth is not nearly as important as social networks. Children in the suburbs are losing the freedom to explore their world due to protective parents who are fearful of traffic, strangers, and other worries.

Happiness and economic growth are independent. Perhaps we should invest more in relationships than growing our portfolios. After all, what would you rather have on your tombstone: successful businessman, or beloved father and cherished friend?

I learned this phrase from the relatively poor people of Costa Rica: Pura Vida (pure life)!

Seven Generations

Many of us will have the opportunity to meet our great-grandparents and great-grandchildren, a timespan of seven generations in our lifespan. All of our decisions should be based on the impact of the seventh generation into the future. This is our legacy.

"What about the seventh generation? Where are you taking them? What will they have?"

[photo taken at the Bruce Peninsula National Park Visitor's Centre]

The built environment of suburbia is extremely hostile to children's most basic needs

http://www.raisethehammer.org/index.asp?id=073
Child Friendly Cities
Despite airs of child-friendliness, the actual built environment of suburbia is extremely hostile to children's most basic needs.
By Ryan McGreal Apr. 14, 2005

Reviews
Our society makes a show of being child friendly, from playgrounds at fast food restaurants and furniture warehouses to the vast array of child-protection devices available to consumers. At the same time, our actual built environment is extremely hostile to children's most basic needs.
Richard Gilbert and Catherine O'Brien, writing for the Centre for Sustainable Transportation, have surveyed a huge body of research on how our built environment affects children, coming up with a list of 27 guidelines for creating safer, healthier communities.

According to Child- and Youth-Friendly Land-Use and Transport Planning Guidelines, children need fresh air, exercise, time to run and play, and a chance to move through neighbourhoods and interact with others. Instead, they are strapped into car seats and shuttled from destination to destination, missing exercise, breathing poisonous exhaust, and isolated from their communities. The low density development of "family friendly" subdivisions all but guarantees that parents must drive their children anywhere they need or want to go.

Children who do try to walk face automotive exhaust and the gauntlet of speeding cars if they want to get anywhere. The constant noise of traffic increases children's stress levels and the presence of cars forces children inside, where their opportunities to play and exercise are severely limited.

The results of sprawl development are clear: overweight children at higher lifetime risk of diabetes and heart disease, a significant increase in respiratory illness, even measurable effects on emotional development, concentration, and school performance.

These factors affect everyone's health, but children are especially susceptible, because their bodies are still developing and their lifestyle habits are still forming. Children also eat, drink, and breathe more by body weight than adults, increasing their rate of exposure to toxins.
Cars make low density development possible, and low density development requires cars. When buildings are spread out, distances between destinations are too far to walk and public transit systems can't operate efficiently. Further, the preponderance of cars on the road creates an unpleasant and unsafe environment for those people who do try to walk, further reinforcing car use.

A Child's Address to the Plenary Session, Earth Summit, Rio Centro, Brazil 1992

Hello, I'm Severn Suzuki speaking for E.C.O. - The Environmental Children's organization.

We are a group of twelve and thirteen-year-olds from Canada trying to make a difference: Vanessa Suttie, Morgan Geisler, Michelle Quigg and me.

We raised all the money ourselves to come six thousand miles to tell you adults you must change your ways. Coming here today, I have no hidden agenda. I am fighting for my future.

Losing my future is not like losing an election or a few points on the stock market. I am here to speak for all generations to come.

I am here to speak on behalf of the starving children around the world whose cries go unheard.

I am here to speak for the countless animals dying across this planet because they have nowhere left to go. We cannot afford to be not heard.

I am afraid to go out in the sun now because of the holes in the ozone. I am afraid to breathe the air because I don't know what chemicals are in it.

I used to go fishing in Vancouver with my dad until just a few years ago we found the fish full of cancers. And now we hear about animals and plants going exinct every day - vanishing forever.

In my life, I have dreamt of seeing the great herds of wild animals, jungles and rainforests full of birds and butterfilies, but now I wonder if they will even exist for my children to see.

Did you have to worry about these little things when you were my age?

All this is happening before our eyes and yet we act as if we have all the time we want and all the solutions.

I'm only a child and I don't have all the solutions, but I want you to realise, neither do you!

• You don't know how to fix the holes in our ozone layer.
• You don't know how to bring salmon back up a dead stream.
• You don't know how to bring back an animal now extinct.
• And you can't bring back forests that once grew where there is now desert.

If you don't know how to fix it, please stop breaking it!

Here, you may be delegates of your governments, business people, organisers, reporters or poiticians - but really you are mothers and fathers, brothers and sister, aunts and uncles - and all of you are somebody's child.

I'm only a child yet I know we are all part of a family, five billion strong, in fact, 30 million species strong and we all share the same air, water and soil - borders and governments will never change that.

I'm only a child yet I know we are all in this together and should act as one single world towards one single goal.

In my anger, I am not blind, and in my fear, I am not afraid to tell the world how I feel.

In my country, we make so much waste, we buy and throw away, buy and throw away, and yet northern countries will not share with the needy. Even when we have more than enough, we are afraid to lose some of our wealth, afraid to share.

In Canada, we live the privileged life, with plenty of food, water and shelter - we have watches, bicycles, computers and television sets.

Two days ago here in Brazil, we were shocked when we spent some time with some children living on the streets.

And this is what one child told us: "I wish I was rich and if I were, I would give all the street children food, clothes, medicine, shelter and love and affection."

If a child on the street who has nothing, is willing to share, why are we who have everyting still so greedy?

I can't stop thinking that these children are my age, that it makes a tremendous difference where you are born, that I could be one of those children living in the Favellas of Rio; I could be a child starving in Somalia; a victim of war in the Middle East or a beggar in India.

I'm only a child yet I know if all the money spent on war was spent on ending poverty and finding environmental answers, what a wonderful place this earth would be!

At school, even in kindergarten, you teach us to behave in the world. You teach us:

• not to fight with others,
• to work things out,
• to respect others,
• to clean up our mess,
• not to hurt other creatures
• to share - not be greedy

Then why do you go out and do the things you tell us not to do?

Do not forget why you're attending these conferences, who you're doing this for - we are your own children.

You are deciding what kind of world we will grow up in. Parents should be able to comfort their children by saying "everything's going to be alright', "we're doing the best we can" and "it's not the end of the world".

But I don't think you can say that to us anymore. Are we even on your list of priorities? My father always says "You are what you do, not what you say."

Well, what you do makes me cry at night. you grown ups say you love us. I challenge you, please make your actions reflect your words. Thank you for listening.

Ms. Suzuki is the daughter of David Suzuki. At the age of 12 she spoke at the Earth Summit in Brazil. She received a standing ovation.

Nature-deficit disorder

It is sad to hear about the trend that children are spending less time connecting with nature. This article points out some negative effects this can have on their social, psychological, and spiritual development. Let's continue to protect and promote our natural places and car-free public spaces, for they are indeed treasures.

-Shawn

Nature-Deficit Disorder and Social Integration in Children
By Mario J. Alves
In an excellent interview the author Richard Louv points out that in the developed world children live in a bubble that is slowly disconnecting them from nature. In his recent book, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, he coined the term "Nature-Deficit Disorder."

Several research studies around the world have shown that the lack of meaningful connection with natural areas leaves children spiritually and emotionally impoverished and ill-equipped to face their adult lives. In a study financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Schweizerischen Nationalfonds) and by the city of Zürich, Marco Hüttenmoser studied families using both qualitative and quantitative methods. One of the results: children who can not go outside to play without accompaniment already show at the age of five major deficits with regard to their motor and social skills. This is mostly due to the dangers of car-traffic and lack of suitable play environments near their home.

In a further study Hüttenmoser compared drawings made by children who walked to school with drawings from children who were driven to school by car. When asked to draw their journey to school, children showed very different patterns according to their method of transport.

Pedestrian childhood : Annina, 7 years

Children who walk to school draw a rich path with many details of nature, animals, and other people. Children who are driven to school draw the route, consisting of, at best, a road, a few cars, the school house, and home.

Auto-centric childhood: Roberto, 6 years

Cars not only have a direct impact on children - putting them in danger - but also an indirect impact - changing the streets where they play and depriving them of nature and social interaction. In a more recent project entitled "The contribution of good public spaces to social integration in urban neighbourhoods" Daniel Sauter and Marco Hüttenmoser studied - once again under the auspices of the Swiss National Science Foundation's "social inclusion and social exclusion" program - the effects of traffic on the social relations of residents living on streets with different traffic volumes and speeds in the city of Basel.

The results substantially confirmed the findings of the famous study by Appleyard and Lintel more then 30 years ago: residents who live on traffic-calmed streets have considerably more contacts and more intense social relationships with their neighbors. Moreover, those who live on streets with fewer and slower cars feel safer and use public space more often - only 24% of residents living in 50 km/hr streets claimed to linger occasionally in the street, 37% in 30 km/hr streets reported doing so, and 51% in strolling zones (shared-space with priority to pedestrians and a maximum speed of 20 km/hr). Children who are allowed to be outdoors on their own stay there considerably longer than other children.

In summary: traffic and the quality of the street environment have a substantial influence on the social life of neighborhoods, the use of public space and the personal feeling of being socially integrated. The results of the study show a fascinating spectrum of street life and interactions in the different settings and provide additional arguments for creating walking-friendly, livable street environments.

About the book....

"I like to play indoors better — cause that's where all the electrical outlets are," reports a fourth grader. But it's not only computers, television, and video games that are keeping kids inside. It's also their parents' fears of traffic, strangers, Lyme disease, and West Nile virus; their schools' emphasis on more and more homework; their structured schedules; and their lack of access to natural areas. Local governments, neighborhood associations, and even organizations devoted to the outdoors are placing legal and regulatory constraints on many wild spaces, sometimes making natural play a crime.

As children's connections to nature diminish and the social, psychological, and spiritual implications become apparent, new research shows that nature can offer powerful therapy for such maladies as depression, obesity, and attention-deficit disorder. Environment-based education dramatically improves standardized test scores and grade-point averages and develops skills in problem solving, critical thinking, and decision making. Anecdotal evidence strongly suggests that childhood experiences in nature stimulate creativity.

In Last Child in the Woods, Louv talks with parents, children, teachers, scientists, religious leaders, child-development researchers, and environmentalists who recognize the threat and offer solutions. Louv shows us an alternative future, one in which parents help their kids experience the natural world more deeply — and find the joy of family connectedness in the process.