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  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  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  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 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  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