Community Development

The trailer for our upcoming documentary, Salmon Wars, has just been released! See it here: http://youtu.be/EimPqpMlInY

Background: in recent months, the international salmon-farming industry has been applying for new sites and new leases -- on a truly massive scale. A pair of farms in St. Mary's Bay is licensed to produce 1.4 million salmon, and wll produce as much sewage as the entire human population of Digby County, in which the farms are located. 

Citizens were appalled -- particularly in the communities where the farms would actually be sited.  Yet the government of Nova Scotia seemed -- and seems -- absolutely determined to ignore their concerns, and to rush more salmon farms into production.  Meanwhile one group of concerned citizens approached The Green Interview, wondering whether we could help to inform the public. We suggested that we make a documentary film for free distribution, and the group undertook to raise enough money to cover the costs.

We've been working on the project for months, travelling to Toronto, New Brunswick, BC and Washington to talk to scientists and others, and to visit innovative aquaculture sites. Our Green Interviews with Alexandra Morton, Daniel Pauly, David Montgomery and Alanna Mitchell, all now published, are connected to this project.

We hope to have the documentary completed within the next few weeks -- but in the meantime the issue has been gathering momentum here in Nova Scotia, and we want to give at least a taste of what the finished production will look like. Here it is -- all six minutes of it. Enjoy!

The Green Interview recently posted a long conversation with renowned primatologist Dame Jane Goodall. Goodall is world-famous not only for her trailblazing research with wild chimpanzees, but also for her international environmental advocacy and for her youth organization, Roots and Shoots.

“She was particularly brilliant on the relationship between a healthy environment and a robust economy,” says host Silver Donald Cameron. “People often talk as though we had to choose between job creation and respect for the environment. The truth is, if you wreck your environment, you also wreck your economy. Jane and her people have been doing a spectacular job of enlisting people around the chimpanzee preserve in Tanzania in the task of restoring their sustainable lifestyle by restoring their clear-cut forest.”

My friend Rafe Mair, former Vancouver radio host and former BC Environment Minister, sent this to me (and many others) last week. It's a wonderful story, reminding us yet again of the millions and millions of people around the world who are tackling their own little pieces of the global problem. Paul Hawken describes this as the greatest social movement the world has ever seen -- and this little story illustrates both its modesty and its power.

Friday, August 05, 2011

Kartikeya Sarabhai is one of the world's leading environmental educators, the founder and director of India's Centre for Environment Education. Starting as a tiny NGO in Ahmedabad, Sarabhai's home town, the Centre has grown to encompass 400 professional staff in 40 offices across the country. It reaches into every school system in India, working in every Indian language and advising every state government on greening the curriculum. CEE is also active in Australia and Sri Lanka. In 2005, CEE received the Global Award for Outstanding Service to Environmental Education from the North American Association for Environmental Education (NAAEE).

Kartikeya Sarabhai is a wonderfully innovative social thinker who has developed a powerful understanding of the relationship between the human and the natural environments, and has achieved remarkable success enlisting local communities in environmental preservation and remediation. “Development and environment,” he says, “have to go together. You have to involve people in looking after the forests and the environment. It cannot be done through government and policy alone.”

Sarabhai is also a highly successful businessman. He is the chairman of Ambalal Sarabhai Enterprises, the pharmaceutical company which was set up by his grandfather Ambalal Sarabhai, where he has proven himself an astute and innovative corporate leader.

Our interview with this complex, cheerful trail-blazer is available on the Green Interview now.

Last January, I wrote a column about net-cage salmon aquaculture that roiled the normally-calm editorial pages of the Halifax Chronicle-Herald. Elsewhere -- in Norway, Scotland, British Columbia -- that form of aquaculture is extremely controversial. But not in the Maritimes. I thought we should be looking at it much more carefully. And now, it seems, we are.

In the column, I argued that salmon farming is a rather wasteful way to produce food – it takes 4kg of wild fish to produce 1kg of industrial salmon – and that salmon farming is a heavily-polluting industry at several levels. It pollutes the water with pesticides, antibiotics and industrial amounts of feces, and the fish that escape from the farms – and they routinely do escape – pollute the very genetic code of the wild stocks. The result is a catastrophe for wild salmon. You can read the original column here.

What prompted the column was an escape of  138,000 salmon into the Bay of Fundy from farms in New Brunswick – and a plan for two more huge farms in St. Mary's Bay on the Nova Scotia side of Fundy. This kind of aquaculture has long been controversial elsewhere -- but in the Maritimes, the siren song of job-creation has largely protected the industry.

No more, it seems. This month, the Nova Scotia government approved the farms, prompting a protest at the Nova Scotia legislature on June 17 by tourism operators, lobster fishermen, Mi'kmaq leaders and others. At the protest, lobsterman Sheldon Dixon of Tiverton made a point I hadn't fully appreciated before, namely that licensing such farms amounts to privatizing the sea bottom – part of the insidious advance of creeping privatization that provides the context for so many of our environmental problems.

Stay tuned. The Green Interview is hoping to make a significant contribution to this discussion over the coming months.
 

We recently posted our interview with Bunker Roy, the founder of India's Barefoot College, and an educational thinker of ruthless robustness. He won't educate people who have been spoiled by formal education, and he doesn't think highly of men as students, either. Among his greatest successes have been grandmothers from Africa, Afghanistan and the Himalayas, whom he's trained to be solar engineers and to bring electricity to their remote villages. In many ways, Bunker Roy's ideas turn our concepts of education on their heads.

Nova Scotia is a very small province. Several Canadian cities have populations larger than ours. How can a population so small include so many huge talents?

Celtic musicians by the score, including some of the world's greatest. A fine symphony orchestra. Canada's first repertory theatre, and innumerable little theatres and dance troupes. A children's theatre that routinely tours the world. Internationally-celebrated painters like Alex Colville, authors like Alistair MacLeod, ceramicists like Walter Ostrom, actors like Ellen Page. Brilliant little presses. Oscar-winning film companies. The nation's funniest, most scathing TV satire.

Nova Scotian culture punches far above its weight. But it never got no respect. Until now.

I just delivered a profusely-illustrated keynote speech called “Bhutan: The Pursuit of Gross National Happiness” at a 300-person conference of the Canadian Organic Growers, Toronto chapter. The reaction was really gratifying. People found the talk both fresh and inspiring – someone, somewhere is doing things right! -- and although many in the audience had heard something about this tiny country and its dedication to a better way of doing business and measuring progress, they didn't know any specifics about it.

What I want for Christmas is a forest.

I don't want just any forest. I want a 313-acre tract of woodland near Scotsburn, Pictou County. Until this month it belonged to Wagner Forest Nova Scotia Ltd, an American forest products corporation. It now belongs to the Friends of Redtail Society, a locally-based conservation group formed specifically to acquire it. I want my share.