Thank you for inviting me.
I'm looking at what we're doing to our environment in general, which has always concerned me. I've practised architecture and planning for 50 years now, and I have worked a lot with the planning of communities and also with the indigenous people in the north.
The major concern I have is the fact that even in my lifetime—when I remember as a child in the west that I could swim in and drink the rivers and reach out and catch fish with my hands, and now all those rivers are polluted; they're nothing but sewers. So I ask, does what we're doing to the rivers, to the water, to our groundwater, what we're doing with landfill sites polluting our groundwater, not to mention the pollution of the land itself, make any sense?
We can't look at ourselves as separate from our environment, which we're doing. We feel that we're disconnected from our environment. There is us and there is our environment, but it's not so. We are part of our environment. You start polluting a river and you're polluting yourself and your children. You start polluting the environment and you're polluting your own body. We're passing on a legacy and a heritage to future generations that is very destructive to our humanity as a whole.
We should apply our technology and our thinking, we should apply our resources to cleaning up the mess that my generation has created, mostly, because it's happened in the last 50 years that we have really created so many problems with our environment, in the sense that we're feeling that internationally.
When I was working with communities up north—for example in the community Oujé-Bougoumou, a northern Cree village for the James Bay Cree—we were concerned about the amount of energy we were putting into that community. So, we used waste products from the plants to develop a boiler system and a district heating system throughout the community, providing hot water and hot water heat to every community, rather than using fossil fuels and oil that costs more and is more polluting to the environment.
There are other ways of using waste products, and one needs as much innovation as one can get, but it's almost like every time we come up with a new idea, instead of getting supported by government—and by the bureaucracies of government that have their own silos that don't talk to each other—it's very difficult to get any kind of support for any kind of innovation in the development and planning of innovative communities, and in innovative ways of solving energy problems.
I'm finding that we're not properly planning here in the south, but we're definitely not properly planning in the north, because in northern communities the environment is even more fragile.
You can walk across the tundra and come back five, six years later and your footprints are still on the tundra because the land is so fragile. If we want to develop the north in a harmonious way, in a way that doesn't destroy it, we have to change our habits in the southern part of the country because if we bring the mess that we are creating here to the north, it's even more devastating.
I'm so concerned about the fact that all of our systems, like our sewage systems, they all leak and they all pollute the aquifers. Under Ottawa, the whole groundwater is polluted by our sewage systems that are archaic, but we don't change these.
There are new technologies to develop even our sewage systems that are destroying and polluting the groundwater. The way we handle our sewage, with lagoons and everything, is so taxed sometimes because of the design of our sewage system, it runs into the lagoons. They open the lagoons, which overflow into the rivers and we pollute the rivers. All of our systems that we have need to be rethought and redesigned.
I've been working with Plasco for about 10 years since they first started. I think that is a wonderful solution, instead of landfill, to use that material for energy and not polluting the aquifers and the groundwater system.
Initiatives like that should be supported by the government because what we're doing is not at all economical. We say we're using this technology and that it is the most economical solution. The bottom line is: how much money and is it economical? It is not economical when you're creating so much damage to the environment, which you're going to have to clean up.
Up north, I was working with a community and they extracted copper out of that area and left a lake of sulphuric acid with a big fence around it and said, “Do not enter”. It would cost, I'm sure, $1 billion or $2 billion to clean that mess up. So, what are we doing, you see?
We have to rethink every technology that we're bringing up north. It doesn't make sense, in this archaic sewage system, to plan a whole community around the sewage system instead of the culture and the way that people should work and live together. It doesn't make sense to design a whole community around our anuses. We should be thinking of perhaps planning a community out of common sense.
We have to review these technologies. I'm always wanting to embrace technologies and petition new technologies in any project with which I am involved. For example, the Museum of Civilization that I worked on is geothermal and that was done 30 years ago, where we used the river water to heat and cool the building.
We need to embrace any technology and support any technology that cleans up the rivers and cleans up the earth because that is the legacy we should be passing on to our children.