February 2020

Currently, community engagement around Climate Change isn’t working. In the spring of 2017, the ECEE will be hosting a Summit: Rebooting Climate Change using a Toolkit of messages and stories generated by an innovative, multi-discipline Think Tank being held in Elora in November.

Our newest volunteer program is about to get underway. The volunteers have been trained by arborist Chris Morrison this past week and are ready to hit the street of Fergus and Elora and prune some trees!

Many of you will be familiar with our Tree Inventory program, but this year we decided to turn things up a notch and introduce a pilot project – which has only been organized once before in Thunder Bay: Citizen Pruners.

The goal of Citizen Pruners is to educate a group of volunteers on how to properly prune and maintain a tree. Over the years, NeighbourWoods has planted many trees in our community, but tree care does not stop there. It is extremely important to prune young trees – before small problems grow into bigger problems; and want our trees to last as long as possible in our urban environment. So, that means pruning is a necessity!

Our group of volunteers spent two nights last week learning about tree anatomy and proper pruning technique with arborist Chris Morrison; and with one more field-training night, the eve of pruning is upon us!

So, throughout the months of June and July, a team of 20 volunteers and 4 arborists will be going around Fergus and Elora, wearing orange t-shirts and pruning the young trees – which will help support their healthy growth in the future.

Make sure to stay tuned for more news about our Citizen Pruners Team!

Centre Wellington now has a Public Forest Policy which is a comprehensive document that outlines standards for tree planting and maintenance on municipal and private property.

If you want to learn more about this legislation you can read the document, published January 1st of this year.  To access the document click here.

Korea is a mysterious country. Once one of the poorest countries in the 1960s it has achieved an economic miracle, now chasing Canada as the 11^th largest economy. Among some uplifting stories that I heard from my parents, my favourite is the Gold Collection movement that saved the country out of the Asian economic crisis in 1997. My mother donated her wedding ring and golden charms – a common gift for the one-year celebration of the baby’s birth – to the government while my father took a salary cut to help his company to stay competitive in the exports scene. I would not have had the privilege to grow up in Canada without the personal sacrifice that my parents generation made for the country.

Our nature is also on the brink of collapse, but we have not discovered the way to convince people to share such burden. Dumping more scientific facts and jargons have only frustrated people while the doom-and-gloom scenarios have turned people away from the conversation. Now, the climate change is called with various nicknames such as a hoax, cult, religion or conspiracy. Expressing love for the environment is for the hippies. You could easily avoid the unwanted conversation with the magic word called the environment.

What would be the solution to our pressing issues against the climate change? Could optimistic messages work since negative messages have been ineffective? Don’t we turn ourselves to optimistic stories because we are surrounded by negative news all the time? What about financial incentive because money matters to all of us? How about using marketing techniques and social media? Social marketing has been very effective in reducing alcohol consumption and eliminating drug use. What about the community-level grassroots approach? Farmers markets had a decade of explosive growth. To my surprise, all of these approaches have been experimented in the realm of climate change and proven to be rather unsuccessful.

It seems like we are running out of options. Then, what could be our next move? Nobody knows the clear answer for this question, but we could certainly learn something from the Gold Collection Movement. Neither the government nor organization was able to save the country. It was the power of ordinary people who were willing to make the sacrifice and share the burden that helped save the nation from the verge of bankruptcy. Perhaps, we are waiting for the simple nudge to start the environmental miracle.

Maybe this is the decade you join Neighbourwoods!  Annual membership is just $20 and demonstrates  your support for our urban forest.

Join at the next Tree Talk or email Rob Guthrie (rwfromcw@gmail.com)

This document offers interesting tables comparing various species for their value storing carbon and storm water,  and energy benefits of urban trees in Columbus Ohio. Thank you to Ian Rankine for sending it our way.

We are proud of our achievements last year. Check them out in our Year In Review Report. A quick
but inspiring read. Neighbourwoods Year in Review 2017

Here is our summer 2018 Neighbourwoods Newsletter update!