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Fostering strong community bonds can help us care for the environment. Here’s how. BY JILL BUCHNER ILLUSTRATIONS BY JUSTINE WONG
of Facebook friends and Twitter followers, but can you name people who live down the street? And do you know who grew the vegetables on your plate? Those face-to-face connections, commonplace 100 years ago, are important to sustaining and caring for the world around us. “Throughout history, the way that we were able to get our goods and services was through relationships,” explains Severn Cullis-Suzuki. “Now, with the explosion of the globalized economy, we’ve replaced relationships with economic interactions.” When our food comes from across the ocean, we don’t think to ask how its production has impacted the land, the water or the people who live there. That disconnect allows for injustices to go unnoticed and our planet to go unprotected. “We live in a way that doesn’t allow us to see our exquisite dependence on nature for our health and well-being,” says Cullis-Suzuki’s father, David Suzuki. Community building, suggest David and Severn, is part of the solution to environmental degradation, whether you live in a small town or a big city. And guess what? Strengthening community ties can be fun, says Lindsay Coulter, the David Suzuki Foundation’s Queen of Green. Here are some tips for creating stronger, greener neighbourhoods.
JULY 2015 | CANADIANLIVING.COM
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