Sustainability Soup

Each year members of the Environmental Studies Association of Canada (ESAC) convene at the organization's Annual Conference to network, share their research, and debate ideas regarding sustainability and the future of the planet. In part this book is the outgrowth of such research and subsequent discussions following the Annual Conferences held in 2012, 2013 and 2014, held at the University of Waterloo, University of Victoria and Brock University, respectively. Participants at those conferences and the broader ESAC community were invited to submit work for inclusion in a book on the theme of sustainability. All manuscripts went through a blind review process. The result is a medley - a 'sustainability soup' if you will - of proscriptive, critical and insightful analyses into the current and future prospects for a sustainable planet. The chapters herein cross a number of themes tacitly confronting a distinct dimension of climate change. While the scientific community has increasingly built a consensus on the role of human activity in contributing to climatic change, the question of how we respond - as individuals, as communities, as nations, and as a species - is evermore on the minds of social scientists and in particular scholars of environmental studies. In the first chapter, Lenore Newman considers the potential disruption of the production of three iconic Canadian foods; ice wine, maple syrup, and salmon. Newman considers how climate change might compromise Canada's social and cultural food security. The impact of climate change on Canadian cuisine is considered within the context of concepts of the outdoors, winter, and wilderness. In the second chapter, Carolyn Peach Brown, Maggie Ibrahim and Nicole Ward outline how to build adaptive capacity through addressing unsustainable land management through Farmer-Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR) on degraded land in Africa. This is discussed in the context of the broader literature on international development and climate change using the lens of the local adaptive capacity framework for two case studies, one in Ghana and the other in Ethiopia. In the third chapter, Chris Buse, Cheryl Teelucksingh and Rebecca Hasdell discuss how wind turbines (WTs) and other renewable sources of energy are increasingly being used to tackle energy insecurity and environmental concerns such as climate change. As alternative energy generation continues to become more palatable to decision-makers in North America, WTs have emerged as a controversial topic in environmental public health. This chapter offers an alternative framing to existing debates over the direct health effects of wind turbines. In the fourth chapter, Gary Bowden discusses three major approaches to addressing the climate problem: mitigation, adaption and geoengineering. Geoengineering involves large-scale engineering of our environment in order to combat or counteract the effects of changes in atmospheric chemistry to manipulate the climate system. In the final chapter, Western ideologies and values are discussed as being analogous to invasive exotic species to First Nation and Inuit cultures. Existing ecosystems are disrupted by Eurocentric-based ideas and laws about resource management, economic, legal, and socio-cultural systems to make way for oil and gas development. For hundreds of years Western-based concepts, technologies, values and ideas have been imposed on other societies, primarily through militaristic control of space and resource development as well as religious and educational systems. Western ideologies and values can be characterized as analogous to invasive alien (or exotic) species that are disruptive to existing ecosystems The impacts including the social, cultural, political, economic, and ecological destabilization of the Canadian North are discussed, as well as the growing threat of impacts from increased Arctic shipping due to climate change reducing ice cover.