International Visitors

As I sit here at 10:30 pm on a Wednesday night, I happened to look at the Live Traffic Feed widget on the left hand side of the screen. In the last day we've had visitors from Seoul, South Korea and Surabaya, Indonesia.

So, for those of you just getting up on the other side of the world. Thanks for stopping by. I hope you learned something. I noticed that you were both looking for information on screw-pilings, of the type we used to anchor the viewing deck and boardwalk. I also noticed that you both took the time to read (thanks Google Analytics)  the blog post that had the link to the picture of the screw-piling driver.

We are tremendously proud of the two projects that made use of this eco-friendly technology. If you'd like to discuss it with us, feel free to email us at general@waskasoopark.ca. We'd be happy to talk to you.

For the rest of our international, Canada-wide, and local blog readers, keep coming back to the blog. We've always got a story to tell, information to share, and questions to ask and answer.

Watch this space, as well as our Facebook and Twitter. There is some really cool stuff coming up. Starting with our Family Day event featuring the return of... Peter Puffin!!! This Juno-award winning singer/songwriter is a longtime friend of the Nature Centre. Peter brings great nature-based family entertainment. His signature songs feature the plants, animals, and process that make the world go 'round. With props and costumes for his younger audience members, Peter ensures that there is something for people of all ages. If you want a truly family-friendly Family Day event, the Nature Centre is the place to be!

Our thanks to The City of Red Deer for helping to fund this free-to-you community event.

For more information on Family Day or any of our upcoming programs and events, please don't hesitate to call us at the Nature Centre, 403-346-2010.

Take Me Outside

We were thrilled to be a part of Colin's journey. Colin spent a day in Red Deer giving talks at Annie L. Gaetz elementary, G.W. Smith elementary and West Park Middle schools. He also did a tour of the Nature Centre and had lunch with a couple of the interpreters.

Here at the Nature Centre we have been dedicated to sharing the outdoors with children, for 25 years. With all the new initiatives in preschool and kindergarten outdoor-classes, it is worth noting that the Nature Centre's Nature Nursery program has been an outdoor program for nearly 20 years. Our kids spend 1/2 of their time, each day, exploring the Sanctuary's forests, fields and ponds. In May, June and September, when the weather is a little more forgiving, Nature Nursery is an entirely outdoor program.

Kids need to be outside. There is a growing mountain of evidence to support the idea that the 53-hours/week of screen time that North American kids are getting (outside of school hours) is doing more harm than good. We're seeing increased rates of childhood obesity, increased rates of ADD/ADHD and a increase in the psychological distance between people and nature. Our own research - conducted by Jim Roberston as part of his Masters thesis - indicates that kids who are exposed to early nature-based education develop into more environmentally-aware citizens. They exhibit more empathy for nature and for natural environments.

So to Colin: Congratulations. We are inspired by your run and I am personally, proud to call you my friend. To the nature-educators around the world: Keep doing what you do. The children of today and the natural environments of the future are depending on you.

Environmental Ethics and Environmental Education

Foundational to the work we do at the Nature Centre toward fostering environmental citizenship, is the work we do in encouraging an environmental ethic in the population. There are many paths to a environmentally literate population with a strong sense of environmental ethics. However, often metaphor is required to illustrate what an environmental ethic (or any other ethical framework) would look like.

While at my summer residency at Royal Roads University I had the chance to explore worldviews and environmental ethics. Here is a sampling, with some new thought and content, of some of the ideas we explored. Credit goes to Natalie Bowes who co-wrote the document from which this post was generated.

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Nothing is static. The wind blows, water flows, birds fly and all manner of life is always on the move. Even the rocks degrading in the face of wind and water are changing; rock to sand, sand to dust, dust to mineral, inevitably leaching back into the oceans and lands of the earth to help drive life. We are part of this dynamic system. Everything we are and do is tied our interplay with the living Earth. And, everything we are and do affects the Earth. In the words of Thomas Berry, “We are Earth reflecting back upon itself”.

While phenomenally complex and often subtle, if we look carefully we can see these interactions at work; not just on a species-species basis but at every level of organized and seemingly random life. Between these places of organization, there are transitional zones; places where either literally or metaphorically, there is interplay that brings together disparate factors to create new possibilities.

Florence Krall (1994) refers to these special places as ecotones. In biology “ecotones are transitional regions between two different habitats” (Mortimer-Sandilands, 2004, p.45) The Aspen Parkland of Central Alberta can be seen as a giant ecotone. It is a zone of convergence for the ecology of Boreal forest, the prairie grasslands, the foothills of the Rocky Mountains and the tumbling Badlands. In this space biotic life and abiotic factors influence each other to create a unique system made up of - yet unlike - all the surrounding systems.

While providing rich zones of convergence and interplay that can facilitate positive change, ecotones can also stand as barriers to those unable through the mechanics of biology and/or geology or through social constructs of power, to interact with them. An ecotone, with its ability to facilitate change and create new connections is an excellent metaphor for the path one could take in fostering an environmental ethic.

At the Nature Centre we are an evolving ecotone comprised of a variety of interactions between people from around the region, plants, animals, climate and all the connections those interactions create. The ecotone we collectively create through the Nature Centre can be stimulated to affect positive behavioural change, which with inputs of education and positive reinforcement, can lead to the uptake of an environmentally positive ethic.

Now, it should be made clear that we don't sit around in meetings and have discussions about how we "create an ecotone and use it to foster change". Rather, by visiting the Centre, taking part in a program, going for a walk in the Sanctuary, reading this blog, subscribing to our Facebook group or any of the other ways to interact with us, your fellows and the environment, you are creating and evolving the ecotone. We are merely picking strategic points to interact with it and help it along toward an environmental ethic.