Insights from Open Hands

Going Green: a new trend with a long tradition

Teresa LeGrand – November 2010

‘Going Green’ may be hitting a new peak as a cultural phenomenon, but people have been thinking about environmental issues for a very long time. Even ancient civilizations recognized they had problems with air and water quality, and depleting their soils and resources. Broad social concern about issues such as nature conservancy and harmful pollution have been with us since the Industrial Revolution.

Some scholars trace the roots of 21st century environmentalism back to the reform movements of the progressive era (1890s–1920s). The first international conference on an environmental issue was held in 1955 in response to deadly air-pollution episodes in several major cities. The UNESCO conference on Man and His Environment took place in 1969, as campaigns to save the Great Lakes and clean-up toxic industrial pollution were ramping up in North America. Environment Canada was created in 1971.

The legacy of the 1992 Earth Summit continues to fuel environmental work in Canada and internationally. Through the 1990s and into the 2000s, Open Hands has been fortunate to garner assignments working on a number of environment-related topics, including ozone protection, climate change, and sustainable development. (See our projects page for information on these assignments.)

Doing work that advances the sustainability agenda links Open Hands to a long tradition and adds an extra dimension to the satisfaction of doing good work.

Teach your children well

Teresa LeGrand – March 2010

I keep hearing about how tech-savvy teens are these days (except for the teens of tech-savvy parents, of course). Using mobile phones to post photos and status updates to their Facebook pages seems as natural as doing something weird with their hair. Weird hair has been around a lot longer though.

Just because the kids can do something doesn’t mean that they really know what they’re doing. They might be able to set up the new printer and program your phone, but that doesn’t mean that they’ve gotten better at thinking things through. Two lessons from here in Ottawa:

1. A community police officer made a presentation to a small group of parents at an event organized by our school council. Among the stories he shared was a ‘near miss’ experienced by a local teen who had planned to meet her online ‘friend’ at a Bank Street coffee shop. It turned out that he was a known offender being monitored by police, who intervened and possibly prevented something very bad from happening.
2. The Vice Principal of a local middle school recently let parents know that the school had taken action regarding some of the students’ Facebook activities. Some students were making ‘unflattering’ comments about school staff members. What was surprising was that the students were surprised: even though they had fully public Facebook pages, with their real names, birthdays and photos, they were shocked that the Vice Principal ‘looked’. To them, that was a completely unforeseen invasion of their privacy.

‘Safety talks’ start when our children are very little. The trick is to keep talking when the subjects get a bit uncomfortable. Make time to talk to the kids in your life about online privacy and safety, and get them to think about what they really want to say online. There are some resources posted under Useful Tools.