Planet Haliburton

This episode features an update on the Highlands Corridor Project, an ambitious local undertaking to create and protect a continuous wetland and wildlife corridor across the southern part of Haliburton County and beyond.

Canada has committed to increasing its protected spaces and intact ecosystems from the current level of 12% to 25% by 2025 and 30% by 2030. Currently, less than 11% of Ontario’s land mass is protected, so we have a very long way to go.

The Haliburton Highlands Land Trust’s Sheila Ziman, and wildlife biologist Paul Heaven, join me for this conversation focused on how the Highlands Corridor Project will bolster local biodiversity, keep wetland-sequestered carbon in the ground and help build ecological sustainability in Haliburton County and beyond.

In this episode of Planet Haliburton we take a close look at hope - what it is, where it comes from and the central role it can play in challenging the devastating impact human extractive practices can have on a vulnerable biosphere that supports all life on the planet.

And we do that with one of Canada’s most well-known and revered progressive author/activists, Maude Barlow. Maude has been on the front lines of many of the key civil society-based campaigns that have helped reshape the face of Canadian and international economic, social and environmental politics for more than 40 years.

Barlow has played central roles in the Womens’, Anti-Globalization, Anti-privatization, Water Justice and Rights of Nature campaigns, to name but a few. Each of these movements have energized efforts to create more equitable human societies that understand, respect and live within natural ecological boundaries.

Maude has written more 20 books including her latest entitled “Still Hopeful: Lessons From a Lifetime of Activism, on which this conversation is centred.

This podcast is hosted by ZenCast.fm

This week,Terry Moore speaks with Elizabeth Fournier author of f The Green Burial Guidebook: Everything You Need to Plan an Affordable, Environmentally Friendly Burial.

In many respects the only real certainty in life is death. All living things die and human beings are not exceptional in that regard. That hasn’t stopped many humans, however, from thinking and behaving as if we are somehow outside of the rules governing the larger “natural world” - in particular, that we’re fully capable of indefinitely living beyond the biogeophysical limits all other species face.

With the increased awareness of human-caused ecological crises since the 1960’s and the parallel growth of environmental movements over the same period, the notion of human exceptionality has come under increasing pressure.

A reassessment of our relationship to the larger natural world has in more recent times focused on not only the larger existential crises such as climate change but has also broadened into taking a critical look at conventional high impact, end-of-life practices such as conventional burial and fire cremation.

This podcast is hosted by ZenCast.fm

This episode of Planet Haliburton, features a conversation about “energy poverty” with Tina Jackson, the Executive Director of the Central Food Hub and co-founder of Heat Bank Haliburton County.

It’s no secret that Haliburton County has one of the highest rates of poverty in Ontario, if not the country, as well as serious levels of food insecurity, precarious employment and a crisis in the supply of affordable housing. Less recognized and discussed is the level of “energy poverty” being experienced throughout the county, which has been estimated to be an astounding level 65% of households by the NGO CUSP, the Canadian Urban Sustainability Practitioners.

Report after report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), reiterates the growing urgency of driving down GHG gas emissions and breaking our dependency on fossil fuels, while making as fast as possible a transition to a low-carbon energy system, at the same time.

Addressing both energy poverty and the climate emergency, without leaving anyone behind, will require Just Transition programs designed to address not only the displacement of oil and gas workers but precarious employment and housing affordability crises as inter-related challenges.

The conversation concludes with some initial thoughts on how to create the political will for urgent action at the provincial and municipal levels as we head into a June 2nd provincial election and October 24th municipal elections.

Overshadowed by the February 24th Russian invasion of the Ukraine, the release of latest UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report on Monday February 28th, came with renewed calls for urgent climate action.

UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, says that the evidence contained in the “Climate Change impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability” Report is unlike anything he has ever seen, calling it an “atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership.”

To help understand what’s contained in the second of three Reports in the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Review (AR6) series since 1988, as well as its potential impact on climate policy, politics, and action, I’m joined by Mitchell Beer, the founder and editor of The Energy Mix.

The Energy Mix (https://www.theenergymix.com) is an essential climate and energy news site and digest that tracks everything and anything having to do with the climate emergency.

Follow this link to the resouce list for this episode.

This podcast is hosted by ZenCast.fm

This episode of Planet Haliburton takes stock of Premier Doug Ford’s climate change record with David Robertson from “Seniors for Climate Action Now” (SCAN) in February 2022 - less than four months before the June 2nd Ontario Provincial Election.

Premier Ford has, from the day he was elected, proven to be an implacable opponent of anything having to do with serious climate action.

While Ontario is not a significant oil and gas producer it is a major source of carbon emissions, second only to Alberta, the Tar Sands juggernaut. After winning the 2018 election, Ford dismantled the previous Wynne government’s entire climate plan and joined forces with Alberta and Saskatchewan in a legal attack on the Federal carbon tax.

They lost that battle when the Supreme Court found the tax to be “critical to our response to an existential threat to human life in Canada and around the world.”

While the Federal government continues to set national GHG emission reduction targets, without Canada’s most populous province pulling in the same direction, there’s no possibility of Canada achieving its fair share of the emission cuts required to reign in the climate emergency.

“Posing As Canadian – How Big Foreign Oil Captures Canadian Energy and Climate Policy” with Professor Gordon Laxer, January 27/29 2022

After winning the 2018 provincial election, Premier Jason Kenney set up a 3-year, $3.5 million “Public Inquiry into Anti-Alberta Energy Campaigns”, AKA the “Allen Inquiry”.

Allen handed in his final report on October 21, 2021 having found only a dibble of so-called foreign “anti-Alberta” money where Kenney had alleged gushers. In fact, the amount of foreign money directed to anti-fossil fuel campaigns turned out to be less than the cost of the Public Inquiry itself.

While Allen came up dry on the issue of foreign anti-fossil fuel financing, his Inquiry sparked renewed interest in foreign influence over Canadian energy and climate policy.

This episode of Planet Haliburton features an interview with Professor Gordon Laxer, the author of a December 2021 report entitled “Posing As Canadian: How Big Foreign Oil Captures Canadian Energy and Climate Policy”.

This week's episode features an update on the status of the County’s Climate Change Planning initiatives with Korey McKay, the County of Haliburton’s Climate Change Co-Ordinator.

Climate scientists, UN Climate Reports and Summits, like the recently concluded 26th Conference of the Parties or COP 26 in Glasgow, Scotland in November 2021, continue to remind us of the urgency of the climate challenge we face, the need for immediate and deep cuts to carbon emissions and a rapid transition off fossil fuels.

In the face of the failure of senior levels of governments to stop, let alone reverse, the rise of GHG concentrations in the atmosphere, pressure has been increasing on municipal governments to take a greater role in cutting emissions and putting adaptive measures in place to address current and future impacts of warming already in the pipeline.

Haliburton County is warming at greater then twice the global average. Will the Haliburton’s climate planning process make difference? Will it take a fair share of responsibility to address the climate emergency at the scale of the crisis we face?

This episode features a conversation about the “Highlands Corridor Project” for reducing carbon emissions at the root of the climate emergency as well as enhancing the local ecological resiliency essential to adapting to the warming already in the pipeline.

Canada has committed to increasing the amount of protected spaces and intact ecosystems from its current level of 12% to 30% by 2030. Currently, only about 11% of Ontario’s land mass is protected so we have a very long way to go.

Guests Shelley Hunt, the Chairperson of the Haliburton Highlands Land Trust and Paul Heaven, a wildlife biologist with Glenside Ecological Services discuss how the Highlands Corridor Project, can help make a significant contribution to climate resilience by protecting key species and spaces within the County and beyond.

This podcast is hosted by ZenCast.fm

This episode of Planet Haliburton features an interview with Katharine Hayhoe, climate scientist and communicator extraordinaire as well as author of a recent book entitled “Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World”

By the time this interview first aired on November 11, 2021, the 26th UN Climate Summit, running from October 31st to November 12th in Glasgow, Scotland was down to the closing media conferences.

Unfortunately, the size of pre-COP 26 national greenhouse gas emissions reduction commitments by the 190 plus countries attending the summit fell far short of what’s required to avert turning a relatively human-friendly climate system into our worst nightmare. A process that, as the growing incidence of extreme weather events illustrates, is well underway.

Despite the urgent calls to action from the world’s climate scientists going all the way back to the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, earth warming gases like carbon dioxide and methane continue to rise year after year taking an ever-increasing toll on people and all other life on the planet.

Given the lack of progress in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and the resulting continuous rise in C02 concentration in the atmosphere it is easy to be skeptical about the prospects for an organized stepping back from the brink of climate chaos and all the increased suffering that will cause.

Despite her deep understanding of just how serious a threat the climate crisis poses to humanity, Canadian climate scientist, Katharine Hayhoe, insists it is not too late to avoid the most serious and dangerous impacts and that our future choices will determine what happens.

This podcast is hosted by ZenCast.fm