Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and members of the committee.
I should start by telling you a bit about who I am and what I do. I am the fortunate guy who gets to go around to cities to actually physically dig up the asphalt and drop pockets of nature into our cities. I do that across North America and more and more internationally now.
I was asked to come in and speak about urban conservation. I thought, “What do they mean by urban conservation?” I'll tell you what it means from my perspective.
It means a bunch of signs. It means stay on the trail, sensitive area, no rock climbers, no biking, no camping, no trespassing, stay out, keep out. Generally speaking, for me, when I interact with urban conservation, that's what it means.
The question I have always had is, what are we conserving and who are we conserving it for? What's the end in all of this?
From my perspective, urban conservation has been wildly successful. The situation right now is that people aren't going out into nature anymore. They're staying away in droves. Two to three per cent a year fewer are going to our national parks. Visitors are staying away. The average age of a national park visitor is 52. The average age of a member of the Royal Botanical Gardens is 62. They are literally dying off. We are being enormously successful in keeping people out of our little pockets of urban nature.
I look at this and see that we're facing a crisis of becoming irrelevant. When I look around the room, I see a group of people in front here, and all of us. I'm preaching to the converted. We've probably camped. We've probably spent time outside. We've probably been in touch.
I'm going to ask a question. By a show of hands, how many of you were told when you were kids to come home when the street lights came on or when dinnertime rolled around? Basically, that's most of us beyond a certain age.
The average roam rate right now for an eight-year-old is 150 yards unsupervised. The average roam rate when I was growing up was somewhere between five and 10 kilometres unsupervised, so I had a sense of ownership. What happened was that I know the creeks up the escarpment. I know the trees. I know where the blue clay is, and the grey clay is, and the red clay is. That is my creek, so when I got older and the Borer Logie watershed commission asked for some people to help with the conservation of that creek, I went to conserve my creek because I own that creek. I learned how to own that creek by spending time there.
If we only have 150 yards where our kids can roam and we don't start to create these little urban pockets of nature where we engage people, if we don't shift the conversation from a conservation ethic to a stewardship and engagement ethic, then there's a whole generation that we will miss and that we are missing. We are enormously successful at missing all of them right now.
As a result, things like this happen. I went to do a guest lecture. I walked into the landscape architecture school, and one of the first questions I asked was, “So how many of you people, you future designers of our conservation plans for our cities, have camped overnight?” Thirty-eight out of 40 of them had never been camping, so my opinion, frankly, is that they should all fail. They should not be allowed to design the natural pockets in our cities. Without that stewardship and that engagement, how can we expect the next generation to even show up? We aren't being successful at that. Stewardship and engagement are the key.
If you shift the conversation to early childhood educators, to teachers, we teach them too. I had a conversation with them about the importance of getting out and getting in touch with nature—how dirt is good, and you should get it under your fingernails, and you should plant things and pull them out and explore them, because dirt's good. It's good for the immune system. You have to ingest your peck of dirt. It turns out our parents and our grandparents were probably right: you have to get your peck of dirt before you die.
One of them—and this is a bunch of very young, predominantly female, new teachers, the ones who are going to teach our kids about their experience with nature—put up her hand and asked, “At snack time, how much dirt should I be giving them?”