A quote attributed to David Suzuki:
"...wind farms, like any development, need to be sited properly and appropriately placed in areas where they can have the greatest positive effect with the smallest environmental footprint. After all, the whole point of clean energy is to reduce our environmental burden, not make it worse."
David Suzuki
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Live Earth Events
Subject: Be part of Global Events on Climate and Water this Month
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Hello ,
Great Photos and Prizes from 'Love, The Climate' Giveaway! Thanks to everyone who participated in the "Love, The Climate" Giveaway! Over the course of ten days we received thousands of entries including hundreds of Flickr photos, Facebook photos and posts, videos, and voicemails giving thanks in advance to those who act to preserve our environment today. It takes the energy of a global movement to help solve the critical environmental issues of our time.
Your incredible photos, videos, and posts shine a positive light on the importance of the Clean Energy and Climate bill that will be voted on in the U.S. Senate in the coming weeks.
Poetic Social Mission -- Moving Stars and Earth for Water
Look up to the stars this Friday for Moving Stars and Earth for Water -- a truly unique event of the Poetic Social Mission, to be carried out from space by Guy Laliberté, founder of Cirque du Soleil and president of the ONE DROP Foundation.
The Poetic Social Mission is the world's first artistic and social mission from space. Seeking to help advance the movement in favor of water for all, this one-of-a-kind global event, broadcast on the One Drop home page Friday October 9, will be a beautiful 2-hour artistic event.
Click here for more info.
October 24th -- International Day of Climate Action
350.org is calling on people around the world to organize an action on October 24 that incorporates the number 350 at an iconic place in their community, and then upload a photo of their event.
The International Day of Climate Action will cover almost every country on earth, the most widespread day of environmental action in the planet's history. Your actions on October 24 will help our leaders realize we need a real solution that pays attention to the science at the crucial UN Climate Negotiations in Copenhagen in December of 2009.
Click here for more info.
Thanks and be sure to visit LiveEarth.org next week for a special announcement!
Home
Conserve
Connect
Blog
Petition
Press
About Live Earth
Hello ,
Great Photos and Prizes from 'Love, The Climate' Giveaway! Thanks to everyone who participated in the "Love, The Climate" Giveaway! Over the course of ten days we received thousands of entries including hundreds of Flickr photos, Facebook photos and posts, videos, and voicemails giving thanks in advance to those who act to preserve our environment today. It takes the energy of a global movement to help solve the critical environmental issues of our time.
Your incredible photos, videos, and posts shine a positive light on the importance of the Clean Energy and Climate bill that will be voted on in the U.S. Senate in the coming weeks.
Poetic Social Mission -- Moving Stars and Earth for Water
Look up to the stars this Friday for Moving Stars and Earth for Water -- a truly unique event of the Poetic Social Mission, to be carried out from space by Guy Laliberté, founder of Cirque du Soleil and president of the ONE DROP Foundation.
The Poetic Social Mission is the world's first artistic and social mission from space. Seeking to help advance the movement in favor of water for all, this one-of-a-kind global event, broadcast on the One Drop home page Friday October 9, will be a beautiful 2-hour artistic event.
Click here for more info.
October 24th -- International Day of Climate Action
350.org is calling on people around the world to organize an action on October 24 that incorporates the number 350 at an iconic place in their community, and then upload a photo of their event.
The International Day of Climate Action will cover almost every country on earth, the most widespread day of environmental action in the planet's history. Your actions on October 24 will help our leaders realize we need a real solution that pays attention to the science at the crucial UN Climate Negotiations in Copenhagen in December of 2009.
Click here for more info.
Thanks and be sure to visit LiveEarth.org next week for a special announcement!
Digby Neck- from the Ottawa Citizen
Goodbye, Small Town, North America
Canwest News ServiceOctober 9, 2009Be the first to post a comment
StoryPhotos ( 1 )
Small towns across North America, such as the hamlet of Cayley, Alta., above, are experiencing brain drains into big cities that make life harder for those who stay behind.Photograph by: Lorraine Hjalte, Canwest News ServiceExperts say rural communities are feeding their own demise by encouraging their best and brightest to leave while not nurturing those young people who choose to stay behind. Shannon Proudfoot explains.
An exodus of young people seeking education, adventure and success in bigger cities, combined with economic upheaval that has left little opportunity for those who stayed behind, has resulted in a dramatic "hollowing out" of North America's small communities. And worse, by not adapting to this new reality, small towns are playing a big part in their own demise.
"The big question in a small town is, 'Do you stay or do you go?' " says Patrick Carr, a sociologist at Rutgers University and author of the new book, Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What it Means for America. "This is the key question, not just for coming of age, but for the town itself: Who do you hold onto and who do you not?"
The book is a collaboration between Carr and his wife and co-author, Maria Kefalas. They spent several months living in and studying an Iowa town of 2,000, tracking who stayed and who left.
Small towns have always encouraged their best and brightest to leave in search of better opportunities, Carr says, and that worked fine a generation ago when agriculture, manufacturing and the auto industry provided stable, decent-paying jobs for those who stayed behind. Those industries have been gutted and small communities are now "colluding" in their own demise by continuing to groom some young adults to leave while neglecting the "stayers" who will be the town's future, Carr says.
"It's this ironic contradiction between rural schools encouraging students to spread their wings, but then basically encouraging kids to leave their communities as a result of being over-educated for what the community has to offer," says Aniko Varpalotai, a professor specializing in rural education at the University of Western Ontario.
Parents who once would have hoped their children would take over the family farm are instead struggling to compete with "mega-farms" and urging their children to get an education and choose a different life, she says.
Agriculture is shifting to fewer and larger corporate farms, Carr says, while a globalized, post-industrial economy has replaced previously reliable and well-paying blue-collar jobs with precarious industries, part-time jobs or unemployment in small towns.
And by continuing to focus resources and attention on the young people bound for post-secondary education, these towns are "under-investing" in those who stay, Carr says, leaving them ill-equipped for the new employment landscape.
Michael Corbett, an associate professor of education at Acadia University in Wolfville, N.S., has seen similar patterns in his research on fishing communities in the Digby Neck region of Nova Scotia. He tracked about 750 people who left the local elementary school between 1957 and 1998. He found that as commercial fisheries swallowed up family livelihoods, and the western oilpatch jobs that attracted people from the East dried up, education became both the major reason people left and their ticket to success elsewhere.
The population and age structure in Canada's small towns and rural areas reflects this out-migration pattern. More than one-third of city dwellers (36 per cent) are young adults aged 20 to 44, but that group makes up only 28 per cent of the country's rural areas and small towns, according to census figures.
"In the declining areas, it's the younger people that are moving out and, on average, the older generation are staying," says Ray Bollman, a research economist with Statistics Canada who specializes in rural data analysis.
This exodus comes at a price, not just for the shrinking towns, but also for those who feel compelled to leave, Corbett says.
Warner, Alta., faced the closure of its high school nearly a decade ago because of its dwindling population, which slashed property values and threatened to further decimate the village of 300 people just south of Lethbridge. Propelled by a grassroots effort, the community reinvented itself by founding the Warner Hockey School for girls.
Other small towns have taken a page from the Warner playbook, with Vauxhall, Alta., founding a baseball academy and Cardston, Alta., starting up a rodeo school. Now, Warner is also thinking of launching a flight school, says the hockey school's principal, Mark Lowe.
Carr and his wife are convinced that small towns are the canaries in the coal mine for national economies. They could see the shadows of the current recession there seven or eight years ago, he says, and more attention paid to the strain on small towns might have revealed the communities' vulnerabilities.
© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen
Canwest News ServiceOctober 9, 2009Be the first to post a comment
StoryPhotos ( 1 )
Small towns across North America, such as the hamlet of Cayley, Alta., above, are experiencing brain drains into big cities that make life harder for those who stay behind.Photograph by: Lorraine Hjalte, Canwest News ServiceExperts say rural communities are feeding their own demise by encouraging their best and brightest to leave while not nurturing those young people who choose to stay behind. Shannon Proudfoot explains.
An exodus of young people seeking education, adventure and success in bigger cities, combined with economic upheaval that has left little opportunity for those who stayed behind, has resulted in a dramatic "hollowing out" of North America's small communities. And worse, by not adapting to this new reality, small towns are playing a big part in their own demise.
"The big question in a small town is, 'Do you stay or do you go?' " says Patrick Carr, a sociologist at Rutgers University and author of the new book, Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What it Means for America. "This is the key question, not just for coming of age, but for the town itself: Who do you hold onto and who do you not?"
The book is a collaboration between Carr and his wife and co-author, Maria Kefalas. They spent several months living in and studying an Iowa town of 2,000, tracking who stayed and who left.
Small towns have always encouraged their best and brightest to leave in search of better opportunities, Carr says, and that worked fine a generation ago when agriculture, manufacturing and the auto industry provided stable, decent-paying jobs for those who stayed behind. Those industries have been gutted and small communities are now "colluding" in their own demise by continuing to groom some young adults to leave while neglecting the "stayers" who will be the town's future, Carr says.
"It's this ironic contradiction between rural schools encouraging students to spread their wings, but then basically encouraging kids to leave their communities as a result of being over-educated for what the community has to offer," says Aniko Varpalotai, a professor specializing in rural education at the University of Western Ontario.
Parents who once would have hoped their children would take over the family farm are instead struggling to compete with "mega-farms" and urging their children to get an education and choose a different life, she says.
Agriculture is shifting to fewer and larger corporate farms, Carr says, while a globalized, post-industrial economy has replaced previously reliable and well-paying blue-collar jobs with precarious industries, part-time jobs or unemployment in small towns.
And by continuing to focus resources and attention on the young people bound for post-secondary education, these towns are "under-investing" in those who stay, Carr says, leaving them ill-equipped for the new employment landscape.
Michael Corbett, an associate professor of education at Acadia University in Wolfville, N.S., has seen similar patterns in his research on fishing communities in the Digby Neck region of Nova Scotia. He tracked about 750 people who left the local elementary school between 1957 and 1998. He found that as commercial fisheries swallowed up family livelihoods, and the western oilpatch jobs that attracted people from the East dried up, education became both the major reason people left and their ticket to success elsewhere.
The population and age structure in Canada's small towns and rural areas reflects this out-migration pattern. More than one-third of city dwellers (36 per cent) are young adults aged 20 to 44, but that group makes up only 28 per cent of the country's rural areas and small towns, according to census figures.
"In the declining areas, it's the younger people that are moving out and, on average, the older generation are staying," says Ray Bollman, a research economist with Statistics Canada who specializes in rural data analysis.
This exodus comes at a price, not just for the shrinking towns, but also for those who feel compelled to leave, Corbett says.
Warner, Alta., faced the closure of its high school nearly a decade ago because of its dwindling population, which slashed property values and threatened to further decimate the village of 300 people just south of Lethbridge. Propelled by a grassroots effort, the community reinvented itself by founding the Warner Hockey School for girls.
Other small towns have taken a page from the Warner playbook, with Vauxhall, Alta., founding a baseball academy and Cardston, Alta., starting up a rodeo school. Now, Warner is also thinking of launching a flight school, says the hockey school's principal, Mark Lowe.
Carr and his wife are convinced that small towns are the canaries in the coal mine for national economies. They could see the shadows of the current recession there seven or eight years ago, he says, and more attention paid to the strain on small towns might have revealed the communities' vulnerabilities.
© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen
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