"Watershed Ways" is a newspaper column written by various members and board members of the Ottawa River Institute, about the many wonderful processes and connections in the cycles of life in the Ottawa River watershed. It also covers ways that we human beings are learning to live more in harmony with our surrounding environments.
The Pembroke Observer, Renfrew Mercury, Arnprior Chronicle-Guide and the Madawaska Highlander are running the column on a regular basis. If you are a reader of another valley newspaper, and you would like to read Watershed Ways in your weekly paper, please let us and the editor of the paper in question know!
Do you know of someone who is doing something innovative to conserve resources or practice sustainable living? If so, please let us know so we can write an article about them! You can e-mail us at info@ottawariverinstitute.ca
Our most current Watershed Ways articles are available below, and others are archived here.
The Great
Outdoors By Ole
Hendrickson
Did your mother ever
tell you to go out and get some fresh air and exercise? Did she shoo you outside when she needed to
clean the house, or have some peace and quiet?
Child development
experts are concerned that too many over-protective parents are keeping their
kids indoors. Lack of outdoor experience
causes attention problems in the classroom, depression, and anti-social
behavior. It also contributes to the
alarming increase in childhood obesity.
In his 2005 book,
Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv
introduced the term “Nature Deficit Disorder” and sparked considerable change. (To continue reading this entire article, click here.) Muzzling the Green Message by Ole Hendrickson Why did the mainstream media exclude the Green Party from the April 12th English language leaders' debate, and the April 14th French debate?
Could it be they don't want the environment to be an election issue?
What is "the environment", anyway? It's life. It's our communities. It's everything we eat and all that goes on around us. It's our health and our children's health. It's the basis for our long-term economic prosperity.
(To continue reading this entire article, click here)
Smart Economics by Ole Hendrickson Much of a country's wealth lies in its natural resources. Nature provides water, minerals, energy, animals, plants used for food or timber, and so forth. Countries rich in natural resources like Canada have an advantage over poorer nations.
We don't know how lucky we are.
GDP, the most widely used economic indicator, is the market value of all final goods and services made each year within the borders of a country. Economists who focus only on GDP do not account for changes in the natural wealth that makes it possible to produce these goods and services.
If we don't have enough food, energy, water, or minerals, why, we can get them somewhere else, right? There's some truth in this. Japan, with little energy or mineral wealth, remains a prosperous industrial nation.
(To continue reading this entire article, click here)
More Biodiversity Means more Health, Economic and Social Benefits by Ole Hendrickson Life is resilient. Left alone by humans, species - whether plants, animals, or microbes - pursue their innate tendency to grow and produce offspring.
This poses a question for humans as stewards of Nature: How much life, and how much variety of life, do we want in our immediate surroundings?
The short answer is "More".
More biodiversity provides more ecosystem services. This improves our lives and reduces social costs. Conversely, biodiversity loss impoverishes us all.
(To continue reading this entire article, click here)
E.O. Wilson – Father of Modern Biodiversity Science By Ole Hendrickson Professor E. O. Wilson of Harvard University is a world-renowned biologist, author, and the father of modern biodiversity science. At the age of 82 Wilson remains an active and provocative thinker, writing about biodiversity and about how human interaction with nature shapes personal and social development.
I recently “sat in on” a lecture that Wilson delivered from his office at Harvard through a video conference link to a packed house in the auditorium of the Royal Botanical Gardens in Burlington. The talk was simultaneously video-linked to Nagoya, Japan where delegates from countries around the world were attending the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity.
(To continue reading this entire article, click here)
2010 - International Year of Biodiversity by Ole Hendrickson The diversity of life on planet Earth and its critical importance to human well-being has been in the spotlight for much of this year.
On October 4th, scientists completed an ambitious 10-year Census of Marine Life, exploring little-known areas such as portions of the oceans 5000 meters deep. They found life everywhere they looked, discovering over 6000 new and sometimes bizarre species capable of living "even where heat would melt lead, seawater froze to ice, and light and oxygen were lacking." Using DNA sequencing techniques, scientists concluded that there could be up to 100 times more kinds of marine microbes than previously thought. Bacteria may comprise as much as 90% of the mass of living marine creatures. To quote from the Census' highlights report, "the continually rising number of known kinds of life reinforces the conclusion that the Age of Discovery has not ended."
(To continue reading this entire article, click here)
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