In this episode, we featured Jenna Quinn, program scientist at rare Charitable Research Reserve, a 900+ acre urban land trust and environmental institute in the Waterloo Region/Wellington. In our conversation, we talked about Jenna's path to becoming a scientist with rare, an outlook on Ontario local animals and habitats based on research from rare, citizen science, getting involved and lot's more. Enjoy!

Growing cities often come with a growing economic divide and disparities of resource access to lower income families. How can we learn from other cities to work towards the sustainability of our own? In this episode, we featured Dr. Brian Doucet, Canada Research Chair in Urban Change and Social Inclusion in the School of Planning at the University of Waterloo. In our conversation, we spoke about why there's a need for urban planning and research, learning from Detroit as an extreme example of economic divide, the Kitchener-Waterloo region as well as other regions throughout Ontario, and lot's more.

In this episode, we featured Emily Mills, a beekeeper located in Northern Ontario, owner at Emily Rose Apiaries and current board of directors member for the Ontario Beekeepers' Association. In this conversation, we talked about bees, environmental pressures, how we're impacting bees here in Ontario as well as throughout Canada, the importance of bees in agriculture, and steps we can take to improve the dire situation that bees are facing today. 

This episode featured a conversation with Ellen Newman and Susan Koswan from the Good Green Death Project, an organization based in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario focused at promoting green burial options. Did you know that burials today have a pretty big environmental toll? For example, caskets are usually hundreds of pounds of material, between metal, wood and cushioning, burial vaults can be upwards to 3000 pounds of cement, and embalming fluid is often used at one gallon per 50 pounds of body. To put things into perspective, every year, tens of millions of the 7.4 + billion people on earth will die, and for all the people on the earth today, there's an estimated 15 dead and buried beneath them. Cremations can be a step in the right direction, but they still come at an environmental cost. This isn't usually a topic many of us like to think of, but it is a pertinent one. How can we make dying sustainable? I absolutely love the work that the Good Green Death Project is doing and loved this conversation with them. In this episode, we talked about some of the environmental issues related to traditional burials and cremations, greener options, some of the challenges for implementation here in Ontario, the work they're doing and lots more.

Welcome to the first full episode of Eco Cast! In this episode, Jen spoke with Elaine Ho, PhD candidate in Social and Ecological Sustainability at the University of Waterloo, and Director of Training and Consulting at Waterloo Sustainable Development Group. In this conversation, we talked about Elaine's research through her masters, youth led engagement, PhD, on water management and quality in the region, including the regions impacts on the Grand River, her participation in the UN High Level Political Forum, and lot's more. We absolutely loved this conversation and thought it was the perfect episode to kick the Eco Cast off with. Enjoy!

Welcome to The Eco Cast podcast! From here on in, catch us every Sunday for weekly conversations with Canadian scientists and community leaders about all things sustainability. Brought to you by The Eco Market. www.theecomarket.org