Change is inevitable
and opportunities to get outside and enjoy summer
“The main message I live by is that things don’t always have to be done the way they’ve always been done.” singer, songwriter Billie Eilish in an article by Corporate Knights. Eilish’s 2024/2025 tour raised US$13.3 million for climate organizations, delivered 7.7 million plant-based meals (reducing food-related emission by half), and avoided 135,000 single-use water bottles.
Embracing Nature: The City has purchased 3 hectares beside the flood plain by the German Club to add to the Coves ESA: 46 hectares featuring hiking trails, three oxbow ponds, and rare forest types.
Webinar: Smartphone Photography hosted by iNaturalist, Tues, Aug 4 at noon. How do you get it to focus on that small piece of grass, or a flighty moth? We’ll share tips and tricks for getting the best nature photos you can out of your smartphone, and then posting them to iNaturalist. Register to receive the recording! free!
Family activity: Have you gone outside to document the nature in your neighbourhood? You still have a few days left to participate in the Backyard Bioblitz by Nature Conservancy Canada. Sign up to upload your photos of nature to iNaturalist. It’s a fun and easy way to contribute to conservation. No experience necessary. Open until Mon August 3.
Book Club: Out on a Limb by Ema Buffie of Trees Please Winnipeg Coalition.
It’s often said that trees are the only form of city infrastructure that actually increase in value and capacity over time. So why have so many North American cities historically underfunded their care and maintenance? And why do we continue to indiscriminately mow down trees – and entire urban forests?
Out On a Limb answers these questions and more, as it explores the secret lives and extraordinary infrastructure benefits of trees in cities, the critical role urban forests can play in increasing climate resiliency, and how grassroots organizations can empower city leaders to invest in the urban trees and forests we love–and need.
Out On a Limb is part of The City Project, a series edited by Emma and Michel Durand-Wood.
Petition: 350.org and MP Leah Gazan have teamed up to launch an official parliamentary petition that calls on the federal government to put people and the planet ahead of fossil fuel profits, and stop fast-tracking catastrophic fossil fuel projects. The fossil fuel lobbyists talk to the government frequently - you can too.
At the July 21, Council Meeting: ratification for July 15th Infrastructure and Corporate Services Committee Meeting for a staff report to approve a new 5 year contract for the Operation and Maintenance of Landfill Gas Collection and Flaring System at the W12A Landfill Site
Comcor is the engineer and operator of record for the W12A landfill gas collection and flaring system as has been installed, progressively expanded and components upgraded and replaced over the years. Comcor has provided operation and maintenance services for the system since it was commissioned in 2003.
Comcor is an experienced industry leader and provides similar services to several Ontario and Canadian municipalities.
The estimated annual price of approximately $252,108 (excluding HST) and an estimated total contract value of approximately $1,260,540 (excluding HST) over the five-year contract term in accordance with the proposal from Comcor to provide landfill gas collection and flaring system operation and maintenance services can be accommodated within the base budget of the proposed 2024-2027 Multi-Year Budget.
Motion passed, 15-0
The city’s Strategic Plan Performance Dashboard has 8 Areas of Focus.
Strategic Area of Focus: Climate Action and Sustainable Growth, by ensuring infrastructure is built, maintained, and secured to support future growth and protect the environment.
Strategy B: Create a plan for sustainable growth through waste diversion and energy management innovation that addresses the flow of materials (manufactured and natural), resources and energy.
Action 437 - Grow the circular economy with a focus on London and region.
July 27-Aug 3, Backyard Bioblitz by Nature Conservancy Canada. Sign up to upload your photos of nature to iNaturalist. It’s a fun and easy way to contribute to conservation. No experience necessary.
Sat Aug 1, 9am Mid-summer Native Plant Sale hosted by Kevin Gauci, 750 Inverness Avenue
Thurs Aug 6, 7-9pm movie: The AI Doc or How I became an Apocaloptimist at Grosvenor Lodge, hosted by TREA. A research documentary discussing pros and cons of AI.
Sat Aug 8, 2pm River Revery – Music and Poetry with Penn Kemp & Ann Denny at Westminster Ponds Centre, hosted by Thames Talbot Land Trust
Wed Aug 12, 4-5pm Monthly Dose of Climate Hope with Bill McKibben. In conversation with Sam Matey-Coste, of Climate Action Now
Sat Aug 15, 9:30-11:30am Antler River Rally Clean Up. Save the date! Location TBD
Sat Aug 15, noon Happy Habitats Festival hosted by Thames Talbot Land Trust at Westminster Ponds Centre. This family-friendly festival will focus on the health, diversity, and wonder of our local habitats through a variety of nature-related activities and a live reptile demonstration by Scales Nature Park.
Fri Aug 28, 7pm, London Majors play against the Brantford Red Sox and by purchasing your game ticket through us, you'll support local environmental programming. Tickets are $12 each, and 50% of each ticket sold will go back to the London Environmental Network (LEN).
Sat Aug 29, 10am-4pm 2nd annual London Urban Farm Tour hosted by London Urban Farmers
Fridays for Future is paused for the summer. This is a small group, dedicated to holding a place for youth in support of Greta Thunberg’s global movement.
Podcast: The Nature of with Rebecca Solnit: Why Cynicism Feels Smart—and Isn’t
By Willow Defebaugh of Atmos Magazine
Drawing from Rebecca’s new book, The Beginning Comes After the End, this conversation examines the progress made in the last 70 years as cause for hope—and proof that the impossible happens all the time.
(Excerpts - the entire article is great!-like why the butterfly as an emblem for these times that we are living through.)
People are uncomfortable with uncertainty. Uncertainty is another word for possibility. Only in a world where the future is not yet decided can we participate in it. There are many possibilities of what will happen. How we show up may determine what will happen. (Rebecca)
Theologian Walter Brueggemann: “Hope comes from memory in the same way despair comes from amnesia.”
And I think that hope is backward-looking; to look at how profoundly things have changed and how they changed.
… Indigenous people told a more upbeat story about everything being connected to everything else. If human beings have lived in this hemisphere for more than 10,000 years without destroying it, human beings can have many kinds of relationship to nature, are not necessarily destructive or not necessarily alienated. There are other ways to be.
I think in the big picture, we’re winning. And the right is pushing back against trans rights, trans visibility, trans participation, because it’s something that’s actually flowered and expanded over the past several years and few decades. And I see the entire right-wing project as blowback and regression.
The old world that’s dying is a world of hierarchy, colonialism, segregation, inequality, separating men from women, white from non-white, humans from nature.
..and there’s that question, are we going to retain the righteousness of, you were in the wrong category? And for me, you are in that category forever.
Or are we going to let people transition? The person I always go back to is Daniel Ellsberg, who was a big part of the war machine in Vietnam, and then became the guy who blew the whistle, which he could only do because he had access to all that information. So that’s also a question for me. Do we let people change?
Yotam Marom: …at some level a lot of people on the left don’t really believe we can win in their most visceral, emotional, deeper selves. And if you can’t win, all you can do is be perfect. And being perfect means being right about everything and punishing people for not being right about everything.
I always say, how can I even demand that? I disagree with my former self all the time. I learn things all the time. I understand things in different ways.
We understand the world as interconnected and symbiotic because we have learned from people like Jane Goodall, Lynn Margulis, Rachel Carson and Suzanne Simard.
My friend, David Grinspoon, said this:
a dying star doesn’t look like it’s dying because first it’s supernovas, it gets bigger. And if you look at it, you think it’s getting more powerful, but that’s actually a stage of its death throws because it will go from that supernova to collapse. And that maybe, he said, that’s what’s happening to the right in this country.