Environment committee  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

Environment committee  There is a total disconnect with what this means. It is that level of a disconnect that we have reached. We're going to have to start giving up some of our urban conservation ethic in our cities and we're going to have to start turning it over. The next step for us is to start t

Environment committee  Nature deficit disorder is a phrase coined by Richard Louv, who wrote a book called Last Child in the Woods in 2005 that brought a lot of this stuff together. I've worked with Rich for the last five years as part of his strategic planning committee in the U.S. I'll throw some st

Environment committee  There is no question that those lines need to be crossed. One of the interesting things to mention, of course, is that in that stat of 52.5 hours, there's only a three-hour difference for rural Canadians. It drops to 49 when we get outside of the cities. It is actually not a sig

Environment committee  Fishers, hunters, you know.... I was involved in a conversation recently in which they talked about how they didn't like Richard Louv in particular saving our children from nature deficit disorder, because he was supporting hunters. We need a societal shift of mammoth scale, and

Environment committee  The question of health is important and has been subjected to a lot of research. Playgrounds are important for us. If you leave kids on their own to engage in a natural space with trees and rolling hills and boulders and the things we recall as nature, they'll be there for just o

Environment committee  The most pressing one is this: who are the next generation of urban conservationists? Where is their sense of ownership with the natural world? Where is their sense of Canadian identity going to come from? We have a tradition in Canada of being tied to the land, and we are losin

Environment committee  It's my pleasure. There are a lot of different places. Basically, anywhere you'd see one of those plastic and steel things, you would find us working there. I'll give you some different examples. A private school might call us and say they have this plastic and steel thing. Bi

Environment committee  Yes. The last project I described was a perfect example of that.

Environment committee  We brought in a sponsor to pay for this to happen. They brought $150,000 to the table. We brought in a national charity, ParticipAction, which was involved from how we engaged with the community to some of the programming that goes on afterwards.

Environment committee  Yes, absolutely. The one thing that has been disappointing up until now is that the amount of money committed by all of our federal partners doesn't even amount to the tax we've paid to do the work that we've done, so you're quickly losing your right to be involved, and if it we

Environment committee  On the whole idea of these renatured spaces, I have a quick story. One parent said, “I hate you.”

Environment committee  I said, “Oh, God, here we go.” She said that she hated me because she used to have her day planned. They would go down to the local park and they would get out, because 20 minutes later they would be bored. They would get back in and go.... “Now, when we go to your place”, she sa

Environment committee  There's something about the interpretative quality of nature in an urban setting that jogs our memories. We're hard-wired on an evolutionary scale for this. We are a hunter-gatherer species. You re-engage with this stuff and you allow people to imagine, and they change. That's ul

Environment committee  There's a certain amount of that going on, but that's with an enlightened developer. Without any legislation or any bylaws in place to promote this in some of their work, they're going to do what's easy. They're going to default to what's easy. They have to provide some money for