Our Planet - Volume 2017, Issue 2, 2018

The Norwegian countryside is a magnificent playground for a kid. Swing-sets and slides are fun. But for a child, nothing beats striking out into rolling hills and mysterious towering forests. There is adventure everywhere. I have always lived in a city, but I was lucky growing up to have ample opportunity to explore these treasures of Norway.

Canada is proud to host this year’s World Environment Day. The United Nations General Assembly first designated June 5 as World Environment Day 45 years ago. Today, it remains a chance to connect with our environment and each other, and to continue to build a more sustainable world for our kids and grandkids.

We are at a crossroads in human history. Our actions are changing the planet in unprecedented ways, and if we carry on as at present the consequences could be disastrous. But, right now, we still have an opportunity to change course. If we come together to take the decisive steps needed, we could chart the way toward a sustainable future where people live in harmony with nature.

This amazing, spinning ball of rock and water, hurtling through space at more than 100,000 kilometres an hour, provides us with everything we need to live and be healthy. It’s a delicate balance, with various interconnected natural systems — hydrologic and carbon cycles, ocean and atmospheric currents among them — creating ideal conditions for human life.

Human well-being and wealth are not only determined by economic activity but also by the services we get from nature. Gross Domestic Product measures economic transactions, regardless of whether they are positive or negative for human well-being or a nation’s wealth. It cannot measure the sustainability of economic activities, and it doesn’t capture the contribution of nature to our welfare.

World Environment Day is very important for Bhutan. We take advantage of it to further enhance awareness of environmental conservation and to bring together communities from all walks of life to show solidarity towards keeping our environment beautiful and healthy. Our small Himalayan kingdom, while pursuing economic development, has taken strong steps to maintain our environment for this and future generations.

Conditions are conducive to human life in most inhabited areas much of the time, but nature can strike at almost any moment. When severe natural catastrophes hit densely populated and economically developed areas, these rare events bring large economic costs. They can also hurt a sovereign credit rating, a reflection of a national government’s ability and willingness to honor its financial obligations on time and in full.

It was a chilly February day. Dangwen and his wildlife monitoring team from the village of Yunta patrolled along the upper reaches of the Yangtze River. The river was frozen solid, easy for poachers to walk over. That day, they encountered 220 blue sheep, five white-lipped deer, and a line of otter footprints. On the infrared camera traps that they had set up throughout the valley, three snow leopards appeared, a mother and two cubs – and the cubs had grown much bigger than three months before.

When I presented core concepts and findings on local economic development as a possible report to the Club of Rome under the title "The Blue Economy: 100 innovations, 10 years, 100 million jobs," in April 2009, I sketched out a vision. This was based on an understanding that nature in general – and a wide range of ecosystems in particular – has overcome nearly every imaginable challenge over the past millions of years, and therefore provides an inspiration for how society can chart a pathway towards the future.

In 2015, engineering student Jorge Zapote and his team from the University of Calgary decided to take on a problem that affects millions of poor, rural families around the world – and one whose solution could be key to remedying climate change. They wanted to find a low-cost way of keeping fruit and vegetables cool and fresh in low-resource settings without using electricity.

There was no need to implore our forebears to get outdoors and be in nature. Presumably these ancestors also rarely experienced any gap between what was interesting in their environment and what was important to attend. But the times are ever-changing. Today these two vectors – the important and the interesting – are often at odds as inordinate amounts of information, and the ease of accessing it, dominate our swirling world.

Forests, lakes, rivers and fertile land provide income and employment for many men and women living in Africa. But unsustainable use of these resources can trap them in poverty. One way to reduce poverty and catalyse change is by producing and using evidence that brings together the environmental, economic and social dimensions of development. This is the so-called integrated approach to sustainable development.

To change a society, as the philosopher Ivan Illich wrote, “you must tell a more powerful tale, one so persuasive that it sweeps away the old myths and becomes the preferred story, one so inclusive that it gathers all the bits of our past and present into a coherent whole, one that even shines some light into our future so that we can take the next step…”

What wouldn't we do for our kids? We play in the park, cut down on sugar, walk them home from school, talk around that all-important dinner table - the stuff of everyday life that shows we care.

Three childhood experiences set me on the course to working to restore degraded land through helping to connect people to nature. My mother’s strong and unwavering faith helped me to appreciate that life was about more than what we could accumulate in the present, and that we could trust a loving heavenly father for all our needs. The abuse of beautiful forests and mountain streams seemed to be an expression of greed and disregard for future generations. Watching news programs showing children just like me going hungry seemed mad in a world of plenty.

The Aqua Republica game combines game mechanics and hydrological simulations to help people better appreciate the inter-linkages between water resources, social and economic development, and environmental sustainability.

History was made recently when a court recognized the rivers Ganges and Yamuna as a living entity. This affords opportunities to tackle problems related to water and climate change sustainably amid the rapid melting of Himalayan glaciers, the depletion of groundwater resources, pollution of ground and surface water resources, erratic rainfall patterns that wreak havoc with human lives and property, and calamities like flash floods, landslides, avalanches and famines.

Canada has 46 national parks and reserves, 171 national historic sites and four national marine conservation areas, adding up to 300,000 square kilometres of protected areas. They represent the country's massive, yet varied, landscapes from the towering mountains of Waterton Lakes National Park in Alberta, to the sparkling sands of Sable Island National Park Reserve off Nova Scotia, to the lush rain forest of Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve on the coast of British Columbia. All these places tell Canada's ecological and cultural story. As its population becomes increasingly urban – and with the average park over two hours from a city – the need is to make more visiting opportunities available.

Some 30 years ago, the celebrated author Annie Proulx was driving through the backroads of Michigan's Upper Peninsula when she came to a highway junction, marked only by an apparently closed laundromat. “Across the road” she told Our Planet “was a large sign, announcing that in that place in the nineteenth century had grown the finest white pine forest in the world. There was not a single white pine in sight”.