Two summers ago, I was on a mission of sorts. I was learning how to authentically cook vegetables I had never heard of from around the world. But instead of travelling to East Asia for gai lan or the Caribbean for callaloo, I neighbourhood-hopped around Toronto to Chinatown and Little Jamaica. 

Before long, I could name four different ways to make salsa verde, advise others on how to cook okra so it didn’t get slimy, and tell the difference between choy sum, yu choy, gai lan and bok choy (90 per cent of the time). While my newfound passion was rooted in my genuine love for culinary adventure, it was expedited by a fortuitous change in jobs that had me doing cooking demos with culturally diverse vegetables at farmers’ markets – where crops like these were increasingly popping up. I was going global but eating local and loving every minute of it. It turns out that I was far from alone.

Canadian food tastes have never been more varied. Living in Toronto, I can peruse a dozen types of kimchi in a Korean supermarket in one moment and, in the next, be taking in the aroma of fresh curry leaves in an Indian variety store. Myriad restaurants offer up the delectable tastes of the planet and every type of fusion under the sun. This incredible range of offerings reflects a changing demographic among newcomers to Canada. About one-fifth of Canada’s population is foreign-born, and city centres reach even higher densities – more than 45 per cent of Toronto’s population is new to Canada, and nearly 40 per cent of Vancouver’s. But it’s not just that new Canadians are enjoying the flavours of their homeland; the eating habits of both new and established Canadians are increasingly cross-cultural.

The global food system and its complex transit web enables North American eaters to have access to pretty much any food at all times of the year. Canada’s citrus- and banana-laden trade routes to Latin America and the Caribbean are well established and have made tropical fruits household staples. And now, with a recent influx of newcomers to Canada from Asia and Africa, it’s not unusual to find bitter melon, cassava and okra lining grocery store shelves. This is great news for both the culinary-curious and those who use these crops as daily staples. Food, after all, is the core of culture and identity, and having access to the tastes of ‘back home’ can help ease the transition to a new land. 

Yet local-food advocates have been wondering if some of these worldly crops could save themselves a trip around the world and be grown in Canada instead. Of course, tropical perennials like the banana don’t stand a chance in Canadian winters without a heated greenhouse. But heat-loving vegetables are perfect candidates for what, in economic terms, is called import substitution. 

Wouldn’t it be great if Canada’s cultural diversity could be reflected in the soil as well as in our cities? There may be no better way to make the local food movement more inclusive to those who find greater delight in callaloo than carrots. 

To be fair, foods from around the world have long been cultivated in Canadian soils. In fact, most of what grocery stores offer today originally hailed from abroad and came to Canada with earlier immigrant waves. In a similar vein, the more recent waves of immigrants have brought their own crops too. A trip to one of Toronto’s many community gardens will prove that culturally diverse vegetables have already set roots here. It is the commercialization of these vegetables that is just starting to sprout. Until recently, unless you grew bottle gourd in your backyard or community garden, you’d be hard-pressed to find it sourced locally at the grocery store. 

But that’s about to change thanks to the trailblazing work of several Ontario-based institutions. The University of Guelph, FarmStart and the Vineland Research and Innovation Centre have been investigating the potential of growing and selling various Asian, African, Caribbean and Latin American vegetables in Ontario and beyond. These crops don’t easily fit into any singular classification, but are often referred to as “ethnic,” “ethno-cultural” or “world” crops. 

The University of Guelph’s Ethno-Cultural Vegetables Ontario (ECVO) project conducted some initial research with FarmStart to identify the market size for Asian, Caribbean and African vegetables. Their tally pegged the total retail value of these crops entering just the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) at a staggering $732 million annually, primarily from overseas producers. This research not only confirmed that newcomers to Ontario are continuing to consume cultural favourites like okra or Indian eggplant, but also that there is actually a substantial opportunity for local farmers to access a portion of this rapidly expanding market. 

Seeing the obvious opportunity for local farmers, Niagara-based Vineland Research and Innovation Centre launched its own research program into the cultivation and market development for world crops. Now in its fourth season, Vineland has studied the performance of 15 new-to-Ontario crops through field trials on its own site and more than a dozen collaborating farms around southern Ontario. This work has explored which crops are able to thrive in Ontario’s climate, as well as which soil, water and fertility conditions are best suited for each. For Vineland, honing in on cultivation practices is only part of the puzzle; ensuring that Ontario farmers grow the right variety to meet market demand is essential, as is the harvest and storage method so that crops stay fresh en route to market.

Isabelle Lesschaeve, Vineland’s research director of consumer insights and product innovation, has been leading focus groups, online surveys and taste-test trials with newcomer communities to identify if the crops being produced in Ontario stand up to the imports. “We learned that visually, the consumers familiar with okra [or] long and round eggplant preferred locally grown produce over imported ones,” explains Lesschaeve. “However, we also learned that depending on the consumers’ cultural background, the preferred shape and size of the vegetable differed.”

Lesschaeve points out that while price was the most significant purchasing driver for participants in the study, there was also a strong “home country bias” – a preference among consumers to buy vegetables that hail from their homelands. As such, “the selling proposition to the ethnic consumers,” she stresses, “should therefore take into account all these factors because ‘locally grown’ won’t be enough to outperform imported produce.” 

It’s nuances like these that make the research legwork all the more important to trailblazing farmers. After all, organizations like Vineland, the University of Guelph and FarmStart want to make sure that a farmer’s first foray into world crop cultivation is a successful one.

The research’s timing couldn’t be better. Already, adventurous farmers are experimenting with more culturally diverse crops on their lands, intuitively recognizing the market demand. Among them, new Canadians, many of whom are already familiar with the cultivation techniques for these crops, have found themselves on the leading edge of a growing market niche. 

Garry Proven (right) founded Country Herbs organic farm in 2000. Partners Imraan Esmile and Lalli Singh (left and middle) now live on the farm in Courtland, Ontario, along with and their two children. After a promising trial season of growing and – most importantly – selling eggplant on the advice of Vineland Research and Innovation Centre, they’ve planted even more this spring. “Growing the food is the easy part,” says Proven, “the hard part is finding the market.” Country Herbs has succeeded because large grocery stores are looking to stock locally grown products to feed global appetites. 
Photo © Stuart Bulmer

Southern Horizons Market Farm is one of a growing number of businesses that produce worldly vegetables in Southwestern Ontario. Co-owners Margaret Zondo and Rodney Garnes both came from food-growing families in their home countries – Zimbabwe and Barbados, respectively. The couple met here in Canada and immediately bonded over their mutual interest in farming, a way of life that their landed communities seemed to be actively distancing themselves from. They did some research on how to acquire or lease land to grow the vegetables and herbs that they loved to eat, and discovered FarmStart. 

Together the pair persevered and planted their first quarter-acre at FarmStart’s McVean Farm in Brampton, Ontario, an incubator program that currently provides growing plots to three dozen farmers – many of whom are also new Canadians. The 18-hectare McVean Farm is a strange mix of urban and rural, and an unexpected swath of green space nestled among several subdivisions. After five seasons under their belts, Zondo and Garnes’ enterprise has grown to a bustling 2.5-acres (one hectare) planted with more than 40 crop varieties. 

Alongside some market garden standards, much of what Zondo and Garnes now grow is crops that were staples in their home countries. Callaloo, collard greens, hot peppers and okra all played a starring role back home and continue to here in Canada. “They always say, grow what you like to eat,” quips Zondo. “And if I’m going to tell someone at the market about a crop, I should be able to tell them I eat that vegetable and share my knowledge of how to cook it.” 

The farmers’ markets already seemed to be saturated with produce such as carrots, beans and beets, so they decided to take a gamble and try growing the crops they knew best. It’s working well so far: at three different farmers’ markets, the demand for their diverse offerings has made great strides. You’ll need to arrive early if you want to guarantee yourself a basket of their okra – one of five varieties that they grow. And Garnes’ signature fiery hot sauce is potently popular. 

Their success with their own staple foods further encouraged the couple to try out a wider range of worldly vegetables, including Asian eggplant, bottle gourd and tomatillos. They found the latter, a tart Latin American fruit similar to a ground cherry, to be easy to grow, delicious in salsas and fun to look at because of its delicate husk wrapping. Intriguing crops like these have proven to be a great way to connect with their multicultural customer base. 

Zondo says that Vineland and the support of its world crops program had a strong influence on their approach. A Vineland research presentation about the market and production potential of these crops encouraged them to move forward with confidence. A Toronto-based organization called The Stop Community Food Centre also equipped the couple with some great resources to do community outreach through its “Eat Local, Taste Global” project. The recipes and information cards they created for a range of world crops made it easy to communicate how to select, store and cook these new foods to customers, and they’ve also introduced some of them to freshly cooked salt fish and okra.

As Southern Horizons’ clientele can attest, first- or second-generation immigrants are not the only ones keen to get their hands on high-quality, culturally diverse vegetables. And while Zondo and Garnes have certainly become pioneers of local-food production, their chosen path is catching on more widely too. The profit margins of many traditional crop farmers are declining, so finding products that will give their business a market edge is ever more critical to financial success. The changing taste of the market, then, is opportunity knocking. And organizations like Vineland and FarmStart are opening the door for all kinds of farmers to make the transition. 

Garry Proven, co-owner of a 30-hectare certified organic herb farm in Courtland, Ontario, definitely sees the value in staying tuned into the marketplace. Although he grew up on a farm, he and his wife Wendy both had careers in the printing industry. The move towards digital media in the late 1990s prompted Proven to seek out a small business opportunity that would still have legs for a long time down the road. Seeing the baby-boomer generation’s growing desire for healthy food, he decided in 2000 to buy some farmland near the shores of Lake Erie. The result, Country Herbs, now supplies nearly 20 types of fresh organic herbs directly to retail chains like Whole Foods, Sobeys and Longo’s. 

Already keen to experiment with new products besides herbs, Proven and his business partners acknowledged a shift in Ontario’s cultural demographics and saw growing world crops as a natural next step. Their market research and the demonstrated success of Vineland’s field trials showed both consumer demand and crop profitability, and convinced Proven it was a worthwhile venture. So in 2012 he planted two acres of land with three types of eggplant: pinstripe, Asian long and round purple – varieties that Vineland had identified as popular with South Asian or East Asian consumers. “It was a stab in the dark that first year,” says Proven, “but with all the heat we got, it turned out to be one of our best crops.” 

Through that first year of trials, Proven discovered that Country Herbs’ existing retail clients liked the new eggplants and would buy whatever they grew. Chain grocers like Sobeys and Longo’s would strategically send the Asian and Indian varieties to the stores that catered to those demographics. 

This was all good news for Country Herbs. After all, “growing the food is the easy part,” says Proven. “The hard part is finding the market.” Thankfully, the local food movement’s success has meant that the larger chains are interested in stocking the kind of produce that Country Herbs has begun cultivating. 

Farmers selling directly to chain retailers seems to be a growing trend. To land a contract with a retailer, a local grower needs to guarantee a consistent supply of high-quality crops throughout the growing season. While quality and consistency are relatively easy to deliver on, producing the needed volume is within reach only for larger operations. Finding a mutually satisfactory price is perhaps even harder, as farms need to produce large enough quantities to make the wholesale price they receive from retail chains worthwhile. Most new farmers of world crops can’t produce enough to sell wholesale. But with a sense of which crops will be locally profitable, a season or two of field trials and a good relationship with a buyer, a medium- or large-scale farm could feasibly follow Country Herbs’ path, landing contracts to sell directly to retailers – instead of going through a wholesale distributor, which makes for even tighter margins. 

This year, with a good track record behind him and some solid retailer connections in place, Proven is scaling up his eggplant production to four acres.

Seeing these new crops gain traction with both farmers and consumers is definitely welcome news, and early adopters are certainly benefitting from this emerging market niche. Yet these are just the first seeds of a larger project to establish an efficient and profitable local food system for world crops. 

When talking local food, price is inevitably a sticking point. Can locally grown world crops compete with imports that are being produced on a large scale with lower labour costs? According to Michael Brownbridge, research director of horticultural production systems at Vineland, some crops can. “Based on one year of economic data, okra, Indian eggplant and Asian eggplant certainly made good returns per acre when the cost of production and market value were accounted for.” 

This year Vineland is aiming to confirm this profitability factor with more extensive research into the cost of production and market validation. That said, locally grown varieties may already have a competitive advantage, as being significantly closer to their intended markets makes them fresher and perhaps even more flavourful than imports. “And for the vegetables which don’t travel well – like eggplant and okra, which frequently suffer chilling injury – local versions would have a special leg up,” points out Brownbridge. Also, for the average new Canadian consumer, freshness is a top priority, according to Lesschaeve’s research at Vineland.

It’s unlikely that local produce from medium-sized farms can compete with the rock bottom prices of discount supermarkets and still be worthwhile for the farmer. Yet many newcomers shop at these large retail chains, especially those with lower incomes. So are locally grown world crops out of reach for those with financial or other food access constraints? Not necessarily, it seems. 

The Toronto Food Strategy (part of Toronto Public Health) and Vineland are collaborating to support locally grown, culturally specific foods and make them accessible to low-income and diverse communities across the city. While they are still developing a business plan, the partners are hoping to help create an aggregation and community distribution mechanism that will facilitate co-marketing and product availability. On the retail side, the Food Strategy’s Healthy Corner Stores project hopes to see more diverse and nutritious foods sold at convenience stores located in neighbourhoods that lack accessible, affordable supermarkets or grocery stores. Local world crops would integrate perfectly in such spaces, as well as with another project called the Mobile Good Food Market, which is essentially a produce mini-market that travels to the city’s most underserviced (and culturally diverse) areas. In the face of financial constraints, many people hope that multi-pronged approaches like these will make local world crops more widely accessible.

Despite the inevitable hiccups and bumps, it’s clear that this movement has momentum. With the support of its collaborators, which include the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food, the Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation and the Ontario Fruit and Vegetable Growers’ Association, Vineland is cultivating new farm partnerships, offering workshops and increasing the acreage of Ontario-grown world crops every year. One focus in 2013 is to run training programs for Ontario farmers who are keen to transition some of their land to world crops cultivation, while connecting them to markets for their produce. The goals are lofty and the vision long-term, but a food system doesn’t change overnight. Instead, the longest lasting impact will come from the steady and informed steps of the many organizations who are supporting this shift, and of course, the many hands that are getting dirty in the effort. 

Two years ago, I had never tried okra, bottle gourd or callaloo, never mind cooked or grown them. But my work and writing have carried me on a welcome adventure. I’ve amassed a wealth of knowledge about how to grow these crops thanks to willing farmers who have shared their practices. I’ve collected countless recipes from a mosaic of seasoned home cooks. I look forward to spotting my newfound favourites at my local farmers’ market, and eagerly anticipate them bearing a “grown in Ontario” stamp in my city’s supermarkets. Judging by the popularity of world crops among both new and established Canadians, I know I’m not alone. And so from my dinner plate to yours, let us welcome the flavours of the world – from not so far away. 

Emily shared a mouth-watering Curried Chicken and Okra recipe with us that you’ll definitely want to try! (Non-meat-eaters can substitute tofu or other soy products easily.)

Dig deeper into specialty crops via the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food’s “Special Cropportunities” section, or check out their specialty crops blog. Watch Ethno-Cultural Vegetables Ontario’s collection of short videos about the growing world-crops sector at ECVOntario on youtube. Try Margaret Zondo’s recipes for Zimbabwe mustard greens and more at Vitality Magazine.

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In Heroes, we profiled communities across Canada that were the first to make a splash by making an environmental campaign mainstream. To highlight action being taken against the tar sands, we mentioned the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation and the Tar Sands Healing Walk because of the important work that is being done to fight environmental destruction.

However, Indigenous groups across Turtle Island have been walking for justice since long before 2009, when the Healing Walk started. Here are some important walks that have been led by elders, women and youth to bring attention to concerns of environmental degradation, water issues and indigenous rights.

Grassy Narrows
In 2008, youth from Grassy Narrows First Nation walked 1,850 kilometres from near Kenora, Ontario to Toronto to protest the effects of mercury contamination from logging operations in the 1960s and 70s. While community elders experience the brunt of contamination, youth walked with the message that their entire home ecosystem has been poisoned, and repeated the journey in 2009 and 2012.  Read more about Grassy Narrows.

Clear Water Walk
In February 2013, youth from Jackhead, Fisher River and Peguis First Nations spent four days travelling to the Manitoba legislature as part of the Clear Water Walk, and ended up continuing on from Winnipeg to Ottawa – covered more than 2,100 km in total. Read more about the youths’ concern for their water in Wawatay News Online.

Journey of Nishiyuu
In March 2013, six Cree youth trekked more than 1,600 km from Northern Québec to Ottawa, joined by hundreds from other communities along the way. Spurred by the Idle No More movement, the Journey of Nishiyuu’s purpose was to highlight the unacceptable state of First Nations’ living conditions, the dwindling of Cree culture and traditions and the sacredness of Mother Earth.

Mnidoo Gaaming Bimooseyang Water Walk
During summer 2013, 106 people took part in the Minidoo Gaaming Bimooseyang Georgian Bay Water Walk 2013 to raise awareness about declining water levels. They covered 787 kilometres, visiting sacred places and sharing the region’s long Anishinabe history. 

Idle No More Walk For Future Generations Cold Lake
From October 26th to 28th, 2013, members of the Cold Lake First Nation walked a 100-kilometre loop to protest the non-stop oil spill at the Canadian Natural Resources Limited site. Learn more about the bitumen leak in Heroes, or visit Idle No More to learn about the significance of the walk.

What other walks have you heard about? Email emily[at]alternativesjournal.ca to fill out the list.

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The 2013 Earth Day Canada Outstanding Commitment to the Environment award went to Tom Rand, one of the country’s top thinkers, investors and advisors. He is a trailblazer in the realm of clean energy technology and co-developer of the lauded low-carbon Planet Traveler hostel in downtown Toronto.

This fall he followed up his first book, Kick the Fossil Fuel Habit: 10 Clean Technologies to Save Our World, with a darker, more critical one called Waking the Frog. A\J contributing editor Daryn Caister interviewed Rand in Toronto in September about practical sustainability, Canadian clean tech and apocalyptic language.

For more tough love from Tom Rand, read the rest of the interview in Heroes.

Check out our Current Events blog post, Green Bonds to Roll Out in Ontario in 2014, for more on the provincial plan to attract environmentally minded investors.

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MY FATHER. My earliest memory from childhood was when I was four, and he was taking me camping. It was my father’s absolute love of the outdoors. He was an avid gardener. He would gather plants and small trees wherever he went and plant them in his garden. This was before World War Two, we lived in Vancouver, and we’d be going out fishing and camping on weekends. I don’t think there is any greater way to teach you a love of the natural world, and so I am ever grateful to my father for that.

DAVID SUZUKI

MY FATHER. My earliest memory from childhood was when I was four, and he was taking me camping. It was my father’s absolute love of the outdoors. He was an avid gardener. He would gather plants and small trees wherever he went and plant them in his garden. This was before World War Two, we lived in Vancouver, and we’d be going out fishing and camping on weekends. I don’t think there is any greater way to teach you a love of the natural world, and so I am ever grateful to my father for that.

I went to college in the States. I fell in love with genetics, this really hot area of biology, and I was all set to become a hotshot geneticist. In 1962, I had my first job back in Canada at the University of Alberta, and a woman named Rachel Carson published a book called Silent Spring.

That was a really big shock for the world, because up until that point it was like, science and technology are wonderful and the economy is booming and everything is great. The guy who found that DDT killed insects, Paul Müller, won a Nobel Prize in 1948 for his discovery.

Silent Spring was all about the unexpected effects of pesticides. And as a geneticist, we focus on a chromosome or a gene and try to study one little part of nature. When I read her book, it was as if her message was written to me as a scientist. And that was: Yeah, you scientists are clever; you can invent things like DDT. But the lab is not the real world. You study the effect of DDT on an insect and a plant grown in a growth chamber or in the flask, but in the real world it’s much more complicated. It rains! The wind blows, the sun shines – all kinds of things happen that you never see in the lab.

Out in the real world, everything is connected to everything else.

So you spray chemicals in a field to kill pests and you end up affecting fish and birds and human beings. I thought I was investigating the very essence of nature and what I would discover in the lab was so applicable to the bigger world. And I realized then that because of this idea that we’re so powerful in genetics, we started applying ideas and ended up having all kinds of unexpected consequences. It was Rachel Carson that opened my eyes to a different way of looking at what I was doing.

ELIZABETH MAY

MARY GORMAN works tirelessly against very large, vested interests in the fossil fuel industry, and against provincial governments that think they’re going to get revenue out of oil and gas in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, which is essentially a quite enclosed marine ecosystem. The Gulf has very lucrative fisheries still, and Mary works as a volunteer on a shoestring with no substantial organization behind her, raising awareness and effectively fighting a lot of different proposals. The current one is called Old Harry, and they want to drill a deep-water oil well midway between the Magdelene Islands and the coastland of Newfoundland and Labrador.

Without an environmental review, the Harper administration has identified the Gulf of St. Lawrence as a place where they want to develop oil and gas. It’s such a little-known issue, and there are lots of people who fight oil and gas there – the First Nations in the territory, many fishery unions, community organizations – and as is often the case in these kinds of campaigns, there’s one person who’s a linchpin and never gives up.

Mary lives in Merigomish, Nova Scotia, and works out of her home with a loose coalition called Save Our Seas and Shores. By background she is also a journalist and sometimes a screenwriter, but all her own work goes by the sidelines because she’s so dedicated to keeping the Gulf protected from oil and gas. If it wasn’t for her dogged determination, I think they would’ve had oil wells by now.

Mary and I have the same approach, I think. I’ve always advocated that you never give up. And certainly Mary proves that. You don’t turn your back on proponents of an industrial project; if you want to stay on top of it, you have to be vigilant. And Mary is very, very vigilant. She’s … indomitable.

She’s always prepared with tremendously detailed documentation and she says what’s happening, how the industry is abusing a process, how the regulators are so lax. She’s also a very effective communicator. She’s just an extraordinarily strong activist that most people wouldn’t have heard of. Mary never fails to be where she needs to be when she needs to be there.

TZEPORAH BERMAN

ERIEL DERANGER works with the Athabascan Chipewyan First Nations. And it’s one thing to work on an issue that you know intellectually or even in your heart is important. It’s another thing to work on an issue that directly impacts your community, to have the energy to get out there every day and talk about something that is incredibly controversial and also affects the lives of those you love.

Eriel is a very powerful spokesperson on both environmental issues and Indigenous rights, in her community and internationally. Over the last several years I have been so impressed by her capacity to weave together the financial implications of tar sands expansion with the local ecological impacts and global climate implications, and to tell that story in a way that is incredibly effective. She not only has one of the most sophisticated analysis and in-depth grasps of one of the most important issues that we face as Canadians, but she also has such a graceful and effective way of organizing that I think many people can learn from. She shows incredible leadership while at the same time teaching us all a deep respect for First Nations elders’ voices and those who live in affected communities.

She is a big part of organizing the Tar Sands Healing Walk every year. It’s a very interesting event because it’s not a protest; it’s a spiritual gathering. It’s a healing for those communities. This year Eriel and other organizers brought together over 500 people from all walks of life to come and learn from First Nations leaders and elders in Fort McMurray. There were people there from all over the place that had been brought together and it was an incredibly moving experience for so many of us.

When I first met Eriel, she was working for Rainforest Action Network and Sierra Club. She had designed a finance campaign that held banks accountable for the big statements they make around supporting Indigenous rights and responsible resource use. She had organized in-depth research on project financing at many of the largest banks and was really exposing the contradictions between their so-called principles and their commitment as companies and what they were actually financing. During that time she also organized protests from San Francisco to Toronto. And then a couple of years later our paths crossed again when she was delivering a report on the impacts of Shell’s exploration – not only in the oil sands, but also in their exploration in the Niger Delta and Alaska – at the Shell AGM in the Netherlands. Our paths have crossed many times since then.

She does a lot of work in helping to train members of her own community to really find their voice, to speak to the media about their issues, about oil sands and the growing cancer rates in their communities. But then she also seems just as comfortable and effective working internationally.

I’m a mom, and I’m inspired by her ability to be a mom and to do this work and to balance the needs of her family and her community and her passion. I think she’s a real role model for women everywhere.

Hear more from David Suzuki, including how Rachel Carson’s warning to scientists in Silent Spring led him to a career in television and a focus on the environment, in the latest A\J podcast – we’ve also got an interview with his daughter on inspiring cross-generational environmentalism.

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Click here to launch the First Places interactive map, or read on for just the text version.

1st Ecovillage Zoning
In 2006, the founders of Yarrow Ecovillage convinced the city council of Chilliwack, BC, to approve a unique zoning regulation that increased their land’s maximum density from five to 40 residences. The exception allowed the community of 65 to build a multi-generation co-housing development, an education centre and commercial operations such as a café and deli. Similar legislation exists in other places under different names, such as the Comprehensive Development Zoning in Cowichan Valley, BC, passed in 2003. yarrowecovillage.ca 

1st Community Greenhouse Above the Arctic Circle
The Inuvik Community Greenhouse opened in 2000 after local volunteers and Aurora College students spent two years converting a decommissioned arena to accommodate 74 full-size garden plots (3 by 1.2 metres each). The gardening season runs from May to September, and the greenhouse is heated by the 24-hour sunlight throughout the summer. inuvikgreenhouse.com 

1st Commercial Wind Farm
Commissioned in 1993 and built out in phases, the Cowley Ridge wind farm near Pincher Creek, Alberta, has 57 turbines mounted on bolted steel structures that look more like transmission towers than the sleek columns being installed today. Fourteen turbines are currently being refurbished, but the farm still feeds the grid with a capacity of 21 Megawatts, enough to power 7,665 homes for a year (based on the energy used by a Calgary household). bit.ly/FirstWind

1st to Mobilize Against the Perils of Bitumen
The Keepers of the Athabasca have organized the Tar Sands Healing Walk annually since 2009 to acknowledge the mining operations’ destructive impact on the climate and to the livelihoods and landscapes of those who live downstream. In 2013, hundreds of people joined First Nations and Métis locals in a 14-km walk alongside tailings ponds north of Fort McMurray. healingwalk.org

1st Municipality to Ban Plastic Bags
The Northern Manitoba town of Leaf Rapids banned plastic bags in 2007. While there are only two major retailers in the town of about 500 citizens, it’s still an impressive feat. townofleafrapids.ca

1st Plastic Water Bottle Ban
In March 2009, University of Winnipeg students voted by a three-to-one margin to eliminate more than 38,000 bottles sold on campus every year. The measure adds to an already strong sustainability agenda that has implemented a composting program and an improved recycling system that includes batteries, e-waste, cartridges and light bulbs. bit.ly/BottleBan

1st Full-Scale Recycling Program
It began in 1981 with more than 1,000 homeowners in Kitchener, Ontario, separating used steel cans, glass and paper from other garbage. Today, 95 per cent of Canadians have access to recycling programs that can divert 25 per cent of their waste from landfills, and blue boxes are deployed all over the planet. bit.ly/Recycle1st

1st Stormwater Treatment Facility Park
Opened in 2010, Sherbourne Common integrates an ultraviolet stormwater treatment system into a 1.5-hectare park on the Toronto waterfront. The green space includes a skating rink, splash pad, pavilion and art structures that double as water channels that send disinfected stormwater into Lake Ontario. waterfrontoronto.ca/sherbourne_common

1st LEED Certified Building
In 2005, Stratus Vineyards was granted the first Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification in Canada for its winery building in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. Most impressive is the geothermal technology used to heat and cool the building, but other important features for achieving certification included the recycled insulation and reclaimed wood and steel used in construction, the operation’s composting of plant material waste, and the bike locks and showers for workers. stratuswines.com

1st Community to Ban Cosmetic Pesticides
Responding to citizens’ health and environmental concerns, Hudson, Québec, became the first town in North America to create a bylaw to control the use of cosmetic pesticides in 1991. Two companies, Chemlawn and Spraytech, were charged in 1992 and took the municipality to court to have the bylaw declared invalid. Nine years later, the Supreme Court ruled in favour of the municipality, setting a Canada-wide precedent for local environmental protection. bit.ly/PestBan

1st Windpower Test Site
The Wind Energy Institute of Canada has been testing and improving wind turbines at North Cape, PEI, since 1981. The peninsula’s harsh marine environment and highly variable weather conditions between summer and winter have made the facility vital to considering turbine applicability across Canada. weican.ca

1st Sustainable Forestry Operation
The ancient Acadian forest on Windhorse Farm has been harvested for timber each year since Conrad Wentzell settled here in 1840. Today it remains a stunning example of land stewardship, and the Drescher family (who took ownership in 1990) is committed to maintaining the “functional integrity” of the forest alongside educational and work-study programs and a retreat centre for vacationing naturalists. windhorsefarm.org

1st County to Ban Fracking
In October 2012, Inverness County, Nova Scotia, passed a bylaw prohibiting exploration or extraction of oil or methane gas through hydraulic fracturing. Like the pesticide case in Hudson, QC, there is a concern that municipalities do not have jurisdiction over extractive operations, but the case is moot until Nova Scotia’s independent review of fracking has been done. The review was originally set to be completed in 2014, but it has been extended until an unknown date to include public consultation and expert panels. nofrac.wordpress.com

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Five years ago, guided by the ancestral custom of looking ahead seven generations, the community prepared a vision with four goals: self-sufficiency in energy and food, economic independence – or as Chief Planes has said, “No more living off the dole” – and a return to traditional ways and values.

Chief Gordon Planes of the T’Sou-ke First Nation in Sooke, BC, motivated his community to become one of the greenest in Canada with a simple idea: “We used to live sustainably, and only took what we needed from the land. We need to get back to that.”

Five years ago, guided by the ancestral custom of looking ahead seven generations, the community prepared a vision with four goals: self-sufficiency in energy and food, economic independence – or as Chief Planes has said, “No more living off the dole” – and a return to traditional ways and values.

But the T’Sou-ke cultural renaissance looks more like the future than the past. In 2009, the community collaborated with contractors to build a 400-panel solar photovoltaic system that generates 50 per cent more electricity than the next largest in the province. Power bills at the three administrative offices where the panels are located have since been reduced by 100 per cent; the other 25 homes the system powers have cut costs by up to half.

In 2009 and 2010, hot-water solar panels were installed on the roofs of 42 of the 86 buildings on the reserve. The remaining houses will be upgraded with heat-pump water heaters by the end of 2014.

Some homes have received extra roof insulation and new appliances to replace obsolete ones, and all buildings are pursuing a comprehensive conservation program using energy-saving light bulbs, low-flow shower heads, weather stripping and hot-water-pipe insulation. Supported by organizations like the youth-driven T’Souke Smart Energy Group, conservation kits and behavioural training are encouraging residents to turn down thermostats and mind light usage. The ongoing goal is to get all buildings to net-zero energy usage.

“Conservation is crucial, since it is 10 times more expensive to generate electricity than to save it,” says special projects manager Andrew Moore, who is responsible for transforming the community’s vision into reality. Another crucial part of the equation is economic self-sufficiency, which the T’Sou-ke community is working toward by requiring band members to receive mentoring, training and to work on all construction contracts.

Members of T’Sou-ke Nation are also mentoring others. This year alone, they hosted 32 schools, 54 municipalities and scores of international tourists for workshops and tours. Since 2012, the community has been working with the nearby city of Colwood and its partners on a $12-milllion project to upgrade 1000 homes before March 2014 (solarcolwood.ca).

The next phase of T’Sou-ke’s revitalization is achieving food security. An extensive community greenhouse is being developed to provide foods such as peppers and tomatoes, and an additional eight greenhouses will grow a cash crop of wasabi (Japanese horseradish) for export. “When all is complete we will have a zero-mile diet,” explains Christine George, a local who champions traditional foods and foraging on the beach and in the forest.

Other traditional T’Sou-ke customs are quietly re-emerging too. When tourist busloads arrive, visitors are served a salmon barbeque and offered carvings, paintings, masks, plants and other goods for sale. In 2014, a closed church will be converted into an arts centre.

The vision articulated by Chief Planes is coming to fruition. Energy usage and costs are tumbling, unemployment is decreasing and an accessible, more nourishing food system is being created. Most significantly, however, the community’s pride and confidence are growing.

Follow more T’Sou-ke Nation achievements and initiatives at tsoukenation.com.

The post Old Ways, New Path appeared first on A\J.

There are SOME things you will find on almost every university campus in Canada. There are the chants of orientation week, quiet corners in libraries, goofy mascots and long lines for coffee in the mornings.

But the postsecondary landscape is always changing. One trend is the push to reduce the ecological footprints of campuses and their student bodies. In the last decade, many Canadian universities have made the jump from small standalone initiatives to integrated campus-wide plans that touch on everything from energy use to community gardens to end-of-term furniture swaps.

Holistic Infrastructure

Integrating food, waste, energy and water systems for a more efficient campus requires universities to move far beyond retrofitting old buildings with more energy efficient windows and light bulbs. New buildings have gone up that were designed right from the start to have the smallest footprint possible. The mix of futuristic and ancient technology is really ingenious.

For example, the Social Sciences Building at the University of Ottawa takes a high-tech problem – the vast amount of heat produced by servers in its data centre – and routes it back through the building to meet 80 per cent of its heating needs. The simplest and most beautiful feature of the building is a green wall, where five stories of living plants filter the air.

The Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability (CIRS) at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver also uses waste heat to generate warmth. It has a green wall too, but the chocolate vines (aka Akebia quinata) that grow outside the building provide shade and cooling in the summer. In the fall and winter, they lose leaves to let in more sunlight.

Green roofs are a popular concept. Of course the presence of plants can help lower any building’s carbon footprint by taking a little CO2 out of the air. Green roofs also counter the “heat island” effect – the raised temperatures in urban spaces that come from all the heat-generating activities and devices of humans.

The soil and plants filter and slow rainwater to reduce runoff and make it easier to use as well. The Canal Building at Carleton University in Ottawa, the University of Windsor’s Centre for Engineering Innovation in Southwestern Ontario and the CIRS at UBC all have green roofs that are used to capture rainwater. These buildings are also fitted with sensors to let students see the difference between how green and conventional roofs impact each building’s energy, heat and water balance.

Sustainable Strategy

Of course, big-picture systems thinking considers more than the physical buildings. Progress can be made with activities as well, from expensive programs and technology to student-led education campaigns aimed at changing the culture on campus.

Whether to follow provincial emissions rules or to show environmental leadership, universities are getting serious about shrinking their greenhouse gas footprint. Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, BC, spent $1.5-million in 2011 on energy efficient retrofits. They recover more than 10 per cent of that investment each year in reduced energy needs, and those annual savings are used to do more retrofits, saving even more.

Cape Breton University is aiming to get in line with Nova Scotia’s target of 40 per cent renewable energy by 2020 with two big projects supported by a partnership with Cape Breton Explorations Ltd. and a $36-million private infrastructure fund. A 5.4-Megawatt wind turbine farm has almost been completed, and in March 2012 CBU began the process of switching its main energy source from coal to cleaner-burning biomass. The biomass will come from municipal green waste and local wood  suppliers, and it’s expected to produce energy not just for the campus, but it could also provide 20 per cent of the town of Sydney’s power needs.

This is a great example of how sustainable energy and sustainable economics can go hand in hand. By providing local suppliers with steady revenue and helping to power the municipality, the project exemplifies what a new postgraduate course at Ryerson University in Toronto calls the triple bottom line – people, planet and profit. That course, Capstone Experiential Learning, is required for a certificate in Sustainability Management.

Engineers Without Borders at the University of Ottawa has an interesting approach to making the first “P” in the triple bottom line a priority. The university already had an ethical purchasing policy, but the EWB are trying to get Fair Trade Campus certification by increasing the amount and visibility of fair trade products and educating the community about how those differ from conventional consumer goods.

Local Food

There are about a million students enrolled in Canadian universities. When feeding such a huge number of people, it matters a great deal whether the food was produced, processed, packaged and transported sustainably. Sourcing food locally makes it possible to know what agriculture practices were used and reduces the transportation footprint. Both coffee growers in South America and the farmers down the highway can intimately and immediately feel the impact of those choices, as does the planet.

Exactly what “local” means will depend on the university, the individual outlets and the specific food being sold to students, faculty and staff. For example, Mount Allison University in Sackville, NB, gets about 40 per cent of what it serves in its University Dining Hall from the maritime region. The University of Victoria in the BC capital breaks it down a bit more: 30 to 40 per cent of its produce is grown on Vancouver Island, all of its chicken comes from the island or Lower Mainland, and all pizza, bread, cakes and other baked goods come from local suppliers. Bishop’s University in Sherbrooke, Québec, simply gets all of its food from suppliers within the province, and half of it from within 100 kilometres.

University of Waterloo, where A\J is headquartered, collaborates with student volunteers to buy its produce – all of it traceable to within 100 km and picked on the day of purchase – from a local auction to either resell it at the UW Farm Market or supply university kitchens for making seasonal meals. This approach has allowed uWaterloo to put pressure on its distribution channels to supply more local products on campus.

Ontario’s University of Guelph gets just under half of its in-season produce from local farmers, which the university defines as being grown or processed within 200 km. The university has plans to build a food processing facility that will allow it to buy vegetables in bulk and store some for use during the off-season. U of G also houses the Honey Bee Research Centre. This apiary produces over 8,000kg of honey each year and U of G students get to enjoy 120 cases of it annually. Many universities also promote local eating by hosting events and farmers’ markets, and a few actually grow a little food of their own. The University of Alberta in Edmonton, for example, has a 300-square-metre garden run by volunteers that supplies the campus food bank. The Canadian Mennonite University has a one-acre community shared farm that sells $450 shares for a portion of the produce grown during a 12-week season.

Waste Diversion

Another common characteristic of universities is their high population densities. Schools in large urban centres can house tens of thousands of students in a handful of city blocks. There are malls, power plants, office buildings and stadiums that all produce waste. Reducing the amount of trash that ends up in landfills by deploying smarter and more sophisticated recycling and composting programs is helping many Canadian universities save money and shrink their ecological footprint.

Just about every Canadian university has a comprehensive recycling program and various initiatives to get greater participation. For example, Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, removed all solitary trash bins from its eating areas and main administrative building. Solitary bins generally encourage people to toss whatever they’re holding, even if it’s recyclable. Instead, recycling stations containing five differently coloured bins have been installed to make it easy for people to dispose of any kind of waste material.

WLU and nearly all other Canadian universities have e-waste collection programs as well. Preventing all those broken or obsolete devices like computers and TVs from ending up in a landfill is important because they don’t break down, and the heavy metals in their electronic components can leach into groundwater.

To deal with big furniture items that get left behind or discarded at the end of term because students can’t transport them, Wilfrid Laurier has stuff-swaps and donation drives to reduce the amount that gets thrown out. With all of these measures in place – and more, including water bottle filling stations and discounts on reusable containers for food and drink – WLU has been able to divert more than 60 per cent of its waste from landfills.

There aren’t as many universities with composting programs, but the number is increasing. With a good system, more than just organic food waste can be composted, including dryer lint, sawdust and pine needles. Alberta’s University of Lethbridge has worked out the logistics of collecting and handling food waste and coffee grounds from a variety of vendors on campus, allowing them to compost more than 3,000 litres of waste every month. The University of Northern British Columbia in Prince George puts its compost into an organic garden.

All of these programs, big and small, help to make Canadian university campuses more integrated, efficient and sustainable. And it’s those qualities that are perhaps most essential to ensuring that future generations of students can apply, deploy and inspire even more ingenuity.

We’d love to hear about exciting new developments in sustainability on your campus. Let us know about them by writing to academic[at]alternativesjournal.ca. 

Get a bird’s-eye view of environmental education in Canada with the 2013 Environmental Education Guide, a special publication from A\J listing over 600 degree opportunities at more than 50 universities, plus a new, at-a-glance chart for comparing local and on-campus amenities, living and transportation costs, and outdoor recreation options at school across Canada. Purchase the full guide or view the online version.

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Karen Eilerson founded the Discovery Child Care Centre 15 years ago in Barrie, Ontario, because she wanted to help heal the disconnect between kids and nature. She’s since become integral to nurturing her community by sticking to a simple equation: Less screen time and more green time.

Eilerson moved to Barrie with her husband Chris in 1991. After a few years of commuting to her child care job in Toronto, she left it to look after her own kids at home. In 1995 she opened a home day care service and soon started looking for a place to create her own licensed facility. Her vision of “beautiful, inspiring, natural environments” for  play and learning ruled out many properties, but after a three-year search she and Chris purchased a three quarter-hectare lot and transformed it into Discovery Child Care Centre’s first location, which opened in 1998.

Discovery’s outdoor facilities combine mature shade trees and flowers with grassy areas and play structures. Its natural features and location are inviting to wild birds, deer and rabbits, who delight children and staff by visiting often. It also has areas dedicated to building with natural items like pinecones, shells and “tree cookies” (cross-sections of trunk) and sound gardens that include a ladybug-shaped whale drum, dragonfly xylophone and an 11-key akambira inspired by traditional African instruments. A vegetable garden provides kindergarten students the opportunity to practice organic gardening and harvest produce for themselves and the local food bank. There’s an outdoor sports court, and a skating rink in winter. Eilerson describes the overall atmosphere as “calming, but there’s also lots of room to run and explore!”

Students, who range in age from six weeks to 12 years old, spend a minimum of two hours outside each day and much more when the weather permits. “We believe that whatever can be taught in the classroom can just as easily be taught outside,” says Eilerson. “Nature reduces stress and increases attention span, and allows children the time, space and freedom to discover using all of their senses.”

Discovery’s hands-on programming empowers kids to become stewards of the environment and their community, and the centre’s infrastructure and maintenance methods double as educational tools. It’s the first business of its kind in Ontario to run on 100-per-cent renewable energy (via Bullfrog Power). The grounds are maintained organically and using water from rain barrels, and the staff and students participate in recycling and composting programs. In 2009, Eilerson installed a geothermal heating and cooling system. Her next goal is to acquire solar panels.

Over the past 15 years, Discovery’s unique approach has gained momentum and many accolades – including Earth Day Canada’s 2013 Hometown Hero Small Business Award and Environmental Action Barrie’s awards for Environmental and Educational Programming and Operating an Eco-friendly Facility. They offer a full slate of licensed programs, from nursery school to kindergarten to before- and afterschool activities. Eilerson opened a second Discovery facility in 2007, and the business’ two locations now serve about 200 families from Barrie and surrounding areas of Simcoe County.

Both sites are Eco-Healthy Child Care facilities, meaning they meet certification criteria for minimizing environmental health hazards such as pesticides and polyvinyl chloride (PVC), often found in plastic toys like dolls and beach balls. The original location was also certified as a Nature Explore Classroom in June 2012, a recognition of its excellence at facilitating nature-based play and learning – the first Canadian classroom to receive this distinction. The second location is also aiming for certification by summer 2014.

The most significant indicator of Discovery’s influence is the shift Eilerson has witnessed in children’s attitudes towards the nature in their backyard. A memorable example occurred when she took the kindergarteners out to check on the garden they had spent months tending. “We were very excited as we knew there would be corn to harvest. When we got there most of corn cobs were gone!” At first the kids were disappointed, but after identifying a deer’s hoof print in the beds and learning about their ecology and the pressures of urban expansion on wildlife, “the children came to the conclusion that it was alright to share with them.”

Eilerson continues to dream up new ways of improving and expanding her business. One of her big ambitions is to establish a forest preschool – an idea that originated in Europe and is just starting to catch on in Canada. “While children at Discovery spend oodles of time outside in nature, we do not have a forest. The idea of allowing children the freedom to explore in a forest and to learn new skills like fire-building, whittling and fort-making really excites me!” Eilerson anticipates this will be the work of many years because of the safety concerns involved, but it’s something she would love to make happen.

Navigating red tape is an ongoing challenge. Eilerson explains, for example, how some health inspectors have strict and perhaps outdated opinions about which cleaning products are acceptable in a child care environment. She has found herself educating inspectors about the safety and value of biodegradable and non-toxic options. Because Discovery is a licensed facility, though, Eilerson always plays by the rules.

Another difficulty has been financing their new infrastructure. While schools and not-for-profit child care centres can get funding through the TD Friends of the Environment Foundation, Discovery is ineligible because it’s a commercial corporation. Instead, the Eilersons took out a loan to back their geothermal installation and may have to fundraise for the solar panels. They used the $5,000 Hometown Heroes prize to create and install a second sound garden at Discovery’s newer location.

Eilerson has also struggled to find staff who are well-trained in both environmental and early childhood education. To solve this problem, she has employed a full-time “Nature Curriculum Facilitator” to mentor staff in their indoor and outdoor programming. “I do not believe that any of the colleges teach environmental education in the ECE program,” says Eilerson. “There is a growing movement of connecting children with nature but it is still in its infancy.”

While this movement already has a strong foothold in Europe, Discovery is one of many organizations dedicated to spurring the same trend in North America, ignited largely by Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder. The Children & Nature Network, which was co-founded by Louv, and the Child & Nature Alliance of Canada were recently established to facilitate these efforts by connecting like-minded groups, increasing their access to resources and boosting their exposure. As the movement continues to gain attention and support, Eilerson’s approach has emerged as a great example for educators and entrepreneurs to make a dent in the next generation’s nature deficit.

Get the scoop on Discovery Child Care Centre’s approach and learning opportunities. Nominate a small business for Earth Day Canada’s 2014 Hometown Heroes award. 

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The last I saw Hermann Scheer, he was walking north up a side street from Unter den Linden in Berlin. It was mid-evening in August 2009 and we’d been talking for well over an hour, seated at a small table on the sidewalk next to the Café Einstein, an establishment popular with the many German parliamentarians who keep their offices in the building across the street. He’d eaten a bowl of borscht and smoked a couple of cigarettes and explained in his gruff, thickly accented English how he’d come to be the 21^st century’s most important politician (so far).

He didn’t phrase it like that, of course. He just told me how it was. Scheer was 65 years old and he’d been a member of parliament for the Social Democratic Party representing Baden-Württemberg for 29 years, and among other things he’d seen to the passing of the most important piece of public policy of our time. And so when he told you how it was, it came with its own undeniable gravity, like a war story. He didn’t need to embellish or qualify. There was no call for hype or bragging. There had been a challenge, a formidable foe, and Scheer had marshalled the troops and placed the artillery just so. And now, after another slurp of borscht, he would explain how the good guys had won – how he’d transformed Germany into the greenest industrial economy on the planet.

Scheer likened it to Fidel Castro’s strategy for winning the Cuban countryside. “The idea was we conquer one region, and from there we take the next. And in each region, we start immediately to change things. Immediately they expropriated the land of the big landlords, immediately gave it to the farmers. So people could see they work for us. Hmm? They work for us. And therefore they got more and more support by the normal people, and more and more people wanted to contribute in the fight – young people. And then it lasted less than two years, and then he reached Havana – and took it over. Hmm?”

In person over a casual dinner, Hermann Scheer was charming and forceful and funny and all the other things that meet at the right angles to create charisma and authority, but more than anything he was direct. He did not care to score rhetorical points, was not trying to redirect my biases or deflect my critiques. There was only the march.

In Scheer’s mind, the emergence of climate change on the global agenda in the late 1980s had led inexorably to the development of a simple little policy tool called a “feed-in tariff” – a financial reward for making electricity free of greenhouse gas emissions. The tariff spread like a rebel cadre in the Sierra Maestra from a small village in Bavaria to state governments to the Bundestag, and in its wake came the steady occupation of the German countryside by wind turbines and solar panels and biomass-fired district heating.

There was an inevitability to it. When Scheer’s Social Democrats and the German Green party came together to form the Red-Green Coalition government in 1998, it was only a matter of time until the policy notion became the Renewable Energy Sources Act; only a matter of persistence before it was copied from Spain to China to Ontario to Gainesville, Florida; only a question of how long before a world powered by clean energy and liberated from the menace of climate change was a fixed certainty on the horizon.

Scheer was the instrument of this inexorable change, the catalyst. He had pointed one of the world’s largest economies straight at the target and shown the way. If we all reach the goal, we will reach it in significant measure because of Scheer and his parliamentary allies and the extraordinary work they have done. In terms of building an actual, workable, manifest industrial basis for an emissions-free world, there’s likely no single person on Earth who deserves more credit than Hermann Scheer. As a backbench MP, he orchestrated the most ambitious energy policy shift of any major industrial nation. He helped disseminate the technique to more than 50 jurisdictions and counting. The world is measurably less dependent on fossil fuels because of Scheer. And so he ate his light dinner on the sidewalk looking out on Unter den Linden, and what he explained was how to become a hero in the first uncertain, uneven years of the Anthropocene Epoch.

And then he stood up and we shook hands, and he scooped the half-empty bottle of sparkling water off the table, grasping it between his fingers by the neck.  He walked off into the sunset of a lovely August night, the water bottle dangling loose from his left hand, like a cartoon Lothario carrying wine away with him to a certain seduction. Scheer would be dead from a heart attack just over a year later, and I would be left with this indelible image: a man strolling down a sidewalk in long shadows, somehow easy and loose in step despite a husky older man’s gait, carefree and oozing confidence, certain – so I’d come to think – that he’d already changed the world forever.

Such is the nature of heroism in the Anthropocene that a backbench energy policy wonk is its greatest political leader. The Anthropocene hero’s task is a slow, often thankless grind. The path is murky, indistinct. Accolades – if they arrive at all – resemble no one’s idea of a tickertape parade, and they come with a sort of arbitrary timing, before the work has begun or long after it’s done. Scheer received the Right Livelihood Award – often called the alternative Nobel Peace Prize – in 1999, the year before he marched the feed-in tariff through the Bundestag. He died in October 2010, and a year later, Germany’s electricity grid cleared the goal of drawing 20 per cent of its power from renewables, once deemed all but impossible. It aims to reach 80 per cent or more by the 40th anniversary of Scheer’s death. His passing did not make international headlines.

I have spent nearly a decade now hunting for the heroes of the Anthropocene, though I had no idea setting out that this was the nature of my mission. I started, in the early stages of research for a book that would earn the title The Geography of Hope, looking only to answer a simpler question, a sort of personal dare: Could I find solutions commensurate to the paralyzing scale of the climate change challenge? Did they exist yet? And if so, who possessed them? Who was building the world we so urgently need?

The answer, as it turned out, was not in the hands of activists or self-professed crusaders or mission-driven campaigners. It belonged to entrepreneurs, designers, politicians. It belonged primarily (though certainly not exclusively) to people inside the system itself who somehow saw the light, found new paths and moved down them in pursuit of local problems, often with more immediate concerns in mind.

Scheer never once held a cabinet level position in his own parliament, but he changed the whole world’s energy agenda. His colleagues in the ad hoc Anthropocene Hall of Fame are cut from similar cloth. They are often unassuming individuals with surprising passions, wonks and nerds and technicians, household names only in the tight circles of fellow obsessives. They are brave in the ordinary way of tenacity and strong conviction. Their speeches appear not on primetime TV but at specialist conferences. Not Al Gore, but Hermann Scheer. Not Steve Jobs, but perhaps Elon Musk, who owns a very nimble solar installation company as well as the firm that manufactures the world’s sexiest electric cars. Certainly not Frank Gehry, but definitely Rolf Disch, who designs townhouses in southern Germany that generate more energy than they use. Not JFK and Churchill but Jane Jacobs and Ray Anderson, the founder of Interface Inc., which all but invented corporate sustainability.

This is the nature of Anthropocene heroism – quiet and meticulous, strategic and practical. Jan Gehl, a genial Danish architect, took to counting pedestrians and lingerers on Copenhagen’s streets, asking simple questions about what public space is for. His straightforward conclusions have reconfigured streets and public squares from Scandinavia to Australia and back again. In New York, a Gehl acolyte named Janette Sadik-Khan became the city’s transportation chief, and in due course Broadway and Times Square escaped from the tyranny of the automobile for the first time in nearly a century.

In Ontario, a wonky lobbyist by the name of Paul Gipe, once a single-minded wind energy advocate, started talking up Hermann Scheer’s feed-in tariff in the months after the provincial government introduced its cumbersome “Standard Offer Program” for renewable energy in 2006. He made connections with the Ontario Sustainable Energy Association and then the provincial Department of Energy, and in 2009 Ontario passed North America’s most ambitious renewable energy policy.

Felipe González Márquez, Spain’s prime minister in the late 1980s and early 1990s, used his office to commission what many considered a reckless vanity project – a state-of-the-art high-speed train line from Madrid to his hometown of Seville. Twenty years later, as jurisdictions around the world fumble for the courage to follow suit, Spain – whose trains were a continental laughingstock when González came to power – now boasts one of the world’s best high-speed rail networks. While the rest of the world used an era of staggering prosperity to build empires made of financial-wizard fairy dust, Spain built the AVE. The Spanish economy is no less messy today than anywhere else, to be sure, but the trains still rocket across the Spanish plain at 300 kilometers per hour.

In Dallas, Texas, in a struggling suburb called Oak Cliff, a business improvement group and the local bike shop and a neighbourhood blog came together in the spring of 2010 to organize a street festival. But instead of balloons and bouncy castles, they laid down bike lanes and café patios and street trees, and for a couple of days Oak Cliff had an exemplary main drag that its creators called a “Better Block.” There was not an urban designer or architect in the bunch, and the budget rang in at less than $1,000. Now the Better Block’s builders work with City Hall to duplicate it all over Dallas, and a viral video about its construction has inspired dozens of Better Blocks across America. In Wichita and Oklahoma City and Fort Lauderdale, the cadres of practical Anthropocene revolutionaries have the tools and the inspiration to begin their own victory marches.

Before the term Anthropocene emerged, environmental action was built around protest campaigns and predicated on awareness. It was the domain of activists and lobbyists, and it strove for regulation, preservation, punishment and protection. It achieved extraordinary things in these realms – the creation of national parks, the salvation of endangered species, the reduction of acid rain and the repair of the ozone layer. But it has all translated awkwardly to the 21st century. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions would seem to be a process akin to eliminating the chlorofluorocarbons that depleted the ozone layer, and the Kyoto Protocol surely stood as the natural successor to the Montreal Protocol. But CFCs were manufactured by a handful of companies in a few industries, and their replacements were readily available. The mechanism was almost switch-like in its speed and efficiency.

As the Anthropocene takes shape, the climate change battle affects nearly every aspect of daily life for virtually every person, business enterprise and government body on Earth. It requires nothing less than the reconstruction of the entire foundation of the modern world. It is closer to total war than an awareness campaign. And it will be surmounted, I’d argue, not by protest movements but by practitioners of Hermann Scheer’s guerilla industrial war, the careful accumulation of allies and the liberation of this patch of countryside and then that one and then the next by wind turbines and solar panels, better blocks and high-speed train tracks, bike lanes and complete streets and mixed-use urban spaces.

Let’s revisit a parallel I’ve already made, and consider it a sort of shorthand: there is Al Gore’s strategy, and there is Hermann Scheer’s, and they are really not even the same genre of progress. Gore, though his advocacy work has been admirable, toils in the Holocene paradigm. He raises awareness, disseminates facts and arguments, inspires campaigns. He places climate change firmly in an ideological war between left and right over how to address environmental issues. (That Gore’s political opponents drove him onto that battlefield does not discount the problematic fact of it.) Scheer, meanwhile, addressed not the effects of industrial society but its causes, its engines. He understood that the climate change debate was an argument over energy policy by proxy, and that it would be solved only when the forces driving the creation of clean energy and sustainable economies had the socioeconomic power to overthrow the reigning regime of fossil fuels. It was not about convincing people that climate change was a grave environmental problem needing new regulations; it was about showing them that their brightest future lay in a society powered by clean energy.

When I sat down with Scheer at that café on Unter den Linden in 2009, there was a critical fact about his political career that I was unaware of. It was this: he was the only German MP from any party to vote against ratifying the Kyoto accord. “I am convinced,” he told me, “that the Kyoto target, the Kyoto Protocol, is a barrier. It’s a barrier. It is not a real locomotive. It’s a barrier.”

I asked why. Scheer: “The problem of these whole Kyoto Protocol climate negotiations is that they estimate steps to overcome these emissions by a shift to renewable energies – this is estimated to be an economic burden. And based on this premise, they come automatically to the burden-sharing bazaar. Automatically. And this at a global level, with countries which have very, very different economic developments. Hmm? And very, very different energy consumptions. If you would recognize that this is not an economic burden, but this creates a lot of new benefits, including economic benefits, nobody would need the treaty. Nobody would need it. It is a mental point. It is a mental point. Yeah?”

In Germany, even in 2009, it was not just a mental point, not simply a question of perspective. It was emerging reality. By then, Germany had already installed more solar power under its feed-in tariff than had existed on the entire planet as of 2005. It now repeats the feat annually. On several occasions this year, solar power alone generated 40 per cent of the electricity for one of the world’s largest industrial economies. It did so because Hermann Scheer had long prioritized solar’s role, even though other renewable energy sources were more cost-efficient in the early years of the feed-in tariff. Solar already verges on the cheapest form of new energy in many jurisdictions. Because of Germany’s renewable energy industrial revolution. Because of Scheer. Which is why, as I watched him swagger off into the Berlin night with that water bottle dangling from his fingers, I understood I was witnessing the departure of a bona fide hero.

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