Indigenous stewardship as climate action

Tsleil-Waututh youth prepare eelgrass to be planted in B.C.’s Burrard Inlet in May 2021, part of the nation's four-year marine restoration project designed to protect and preserve the inlet.

B.C.'s Tsleil-Waututh nation is slowly restoring the health of its local waters, after decades of industry and development in the Burrard Inlet.

“We've cleaned salmon-bearing streams, we've replanted eelgrass and bull kelp, and that has to do with climate change too — giving the shade enough for the small fish to come back,” said Charlene Aleck, a Tsleil-Waututh councillor. “And the herring are coming back for the first time in 50, 60 years.”

She said the key to this success is a stewardship policy, based on Tsleil-Waututh traditional laws, that gives the nation authority over their land that they didn't previously have. They are also working with Environment Canada to implement the policy.

The nation has spent years doing clean-ups, creating protected areas and monitoring species numbers and water quality. 

Now, the herring are laying their eggs, which brings in bigger fish, which brings in seals, which brings in orcas. Aleck says all those connections are coming back now, and there’s still work to be done but she’s so happy.

“We can’t go back to the same system that crushed and severed our existence with the land,” said Aleck.

“Going back to our old ways is going to set us up for success, and when we do this work it’s not just for Tsleil-Waututh people. It's for the land, water, air and everybody who calls this area home.”

Reviving culture and tradition can help the climate

Known as the ”land back” movement, it calls for the acknowledgement and return of Indigenous sovereignty over traditional territories. 

It’s also important to climate policy, says Deborah McGregor, who is Anishinaabe from the Whitefish River First Nation and Canada Excellence Research Chair in Indigenous Ways of Climate and Water Sustainability for Planetary Health and Well-being.

McGregor, based at the University of Calgary, wants more First Nations to create their own climate policies, based on their traditional laws and climate changes they are witnessing on their lands.

McGregor says that creating documentation will allow nations to guide their communities through stewardship, disaster management and the shifting climate policies of Canadian governments. For example, Anishinabek laws are still unknown to many people but are well-documented and publicly accessible.

“People can learn about it, people can read about it, and they've done a fair degree of innovation that can really help understand what a lot of these broader concepts are in mainstream climate policy,” she said.

“For example, well-being is becoming more of an important concept — to realize it isn't just how we mitigate or adapt to climate change, it's how we can actually be well under these conditions.”

Concerns about Bill C-5

Ottawa is moving to fast-track resource projects with Bill C-5, which passed in the House of Commons last week.

The bill itself says it intends to “advance the interests of Indigenous peoples,” and Prime Minister Mark Carney said he plans to hold summits with First Nations, Inuit and Métis leadership this summer. However, Indigenous and environmental groups have raised concerns about how the bill will allow cabinet the power to override other laws.

Over the last decade, the Tsleil-Waututh nation fought to stop the expansion of the Trans Mountain Pipeline through their territory, using their stewardship policies to build a legal case. 

Ultimately the project went ahead, but McGregor says the work of creating documentation and climate stewardship plans was not in vain.

A recent Indigenous Climate Action report called Land Back is Climate Action, which McGregor helped write, noted that the climate wins when Indigenous people assert their rights on their lands.

“They're probably not calling it climate action,” she said. “[But] a lot of what they're doing is what I would consider to be climate action: land stewardship, water monitoring, restoration, revitalization of lands, food security.”

— Bridget Stringer-Holden

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Check out our podcast and radio show.  In our newest episode: A year and a half ago, Adrienne Crowder caught an episode we did about a free university course on climate change. She took it, she loved it, and she wanted more. So, she started a network amongst her classmates: ordinary Canadians who support each other to make change in their lives. We hear from many of them, as we kick off special coverage to mark five years of What On Earth.

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Reader Feedback

In response to our story about Boston replacing roadside grass with bioswales to help reduce flooding, Sara Scharf wrote: "Bioswales sound like a great idea until you consider how much road salt will be flowing into the depressions. Most plants are not particularly salt-tolerant. I don’t know how much Boston salts its roads in winter, but we would have to drastically reduce the amount of road salt we use if we would want any plants in swales installed in Canada to survive."

We shared this concern with Christine Mettler, former director of green infrastructure at the non-profit Green Communities Canada. She agreed that salt presents a challenge, and we should be using less of it. But she added: "Right now, salts are largely going into our freshwater bodies (to the point that some ecosystems are actually changing). So, directing salted runoff to swales is better than directing it to freshwater. There are some plants that are remarkably salt tolerant. And, they are doing green infrastructure in a lot of cold weather places, where I would imagine salts are also applied — Milwaukee is a great example. So, it's choosing the right plants for the right conditions."

Lyndee Wolf wrote: "In response to your call for photos of native plant gardens, I thought I'd share a photo of our Kanata North Pollinator Patch in Ottawa. This 113-square-metre native plant garden was created by volunteers on city-owned land in a hydro corridor. Volunteers maintain this garden and are in the process of creating an 883-square-metre native plant mini-meadow right next to it. The garden contains 40 species of Ontario native plants and one ‘near native’ plant." They include butterfly milkweed, Canada columbine, hairy beardtongue, stiff goldenrod and yellow coneflower, among many others.
 

Feel free to send more photos of your native plant gardens — when you send them in, please include your location and what plants are included in the photo so other readers know what works in their region.

Write us at whatonearth@cbc.ca. (And feel free to send photos too!) 

The Big Picture: The disappearing night sky

How bad is light pollution? Well, see those images above? Amateur astronomer Todd Carlson took a photo of the night sky over Goodwood, Ont., the night the lights went out during the 2003 blackout. The Milky Way is stretched out above his neighbour’s house. But the next day he decided to take a photograph of what it normally looked like and there’s only a smattering of stars. 

A 2016 study found that more than 80 per cent of the world’s population live under light-polluted skies. And a more recent study found that light pollution is getting worse. But what’s the big deal? 

Humans come from the stars. We are literally made of “star stuff,” as the late American astronomer and planetary scientist Carl Sagan said. And the night sky has influenced humanity from its earliest beginnings. It helped us navigate; it was used for time-keeping and agricultural practices; it inspired wonder and curiosity; it roused writers and artists; and it created mythologies and religions.

But light pollution also messes with our natural circadian rhythm in ways we don’t fully understand yet. There have been numerous studies showing a higher incidence of many diseases, such as cancer, in those who have experienced artificial light at night (ALAN), such as shift workers. And light pollution also has effects on birds, causing them to crash into buildings, as well as insects, which are facing declines.

But people can make a little difference. We can make wiser choices about the lighting used around our homes, including only using lights when needed and having shielded light fixtures that prevent light from dispersing outward and upward. 

You can read more about how we're losing the night sky here.

— Nicole Mortillaro

Recycling rates boosted when people get a chance to win big

A new study from UBC's psychology department says allowing recyclers a choice to turn their beverage container returns into a kind of lottery could help improve return rates.

A study from the University of B.C.'s department of psychology says recycling rates in B.C. and Alberta could be enhanced if people returning containers were able to choose between reclaiming the 10-cent deposit or having a chance at winning $1,000.

"Often when we're looking at such a small reward like 10 cents, people don't really care about it too much and we'd rather go for that larger chance at a larger reward," said Jade Radke, a UBC PhD student and the lead author on the study.

"We have more excitement with those things, higher hope. It's kind of just like playing the lottery. You kind of do it for fun a little bit as well."

The research paper, Probabilistic refunds increase beverage container recycling behaviour in British Columbia and Alberta, was published in the latest version of Waste Management and co-authored by UBC's Jiaying Zhou, who is well-known for her studies on behaviour and waste reduction.

The findings come as waste continues to choke landfills or end up as litter despite sophisticated recycling programs in places like Canada. 

Information from the World Economic Forum and the International Aluminum Institute says around two trillion beverage containers are produced globally every year, but only 34 per cent of glass bottles, 40 per cent of plastic bottles and 70 per cent of aluminum cans are recycled.

UBC's Radke and Zhou, along with student Stella Argentopoulos and professor Elizabeth Dunn, devised experiments in food courts and at a food festival in Alberta where they encouraged people with beverage containers to return them and make a choice between a 100 per cent chance of getting $0.10, a 10 per cent chance of getting $1, a one per cent chance of getting $10, a 0.1 per cent chance of getting $100, or a 0.01 per cent chance of getting $1,000.

More than a quarter of respondents in one part of the study chose the $1,000 gamble — the most selected choice out of the options — and reported higher anticipatory happiness.

Generally, their study found that "a probabilistic refund is preferred over the certain refund with the same expected payoff, is associated with an immediate boost in anticipatory happiness, and can increase recycling behaviour."

The recycling lottery choice is something that's been in place in Norway since 1997. Combined with strong environmental values and the convenient locations of recycling machines in the country, the lottery choice is contributing to Norway's total beverage container recycling rate of 96.7 per cent, the UBC study authors said.

In B.C. and Alberta, the same rates are 79.6 per cent and 84.9 per cent respectively, according to the UBC study, making them the best recyclers in the country. 
The study's authors are working with British Columbia’s Return-It system to study the lottery option more and determine if it could be implemented to get recycling rates on par with Norway's.

"Adding a probabilistic refund option might be able to close the gap," said Radke.

Would 'binners' gamble?

Something the study didn't consider is what impact a lottery option would have on individuals who return beverage containers for income — people known in Vancouver as binners. 

The paper's authors said they plan to include them in future work.

Jutta Gutberlet with the University of Victoria's Community-based Research Laboratory has studied binners for 20 years, though, and said their activities are a low-barrier way to earn wages.

"The first motivation is economic," she said, adding that it's unclear if they would select a lottery option on their high-volume of returns over the guaranteed 10 cents per item. 

Gutberlet said her research has generally found that binners would prefer a higher deposit, such as 25 cents, to make the containers more valuable and reflect, "the work and also the environmental contribution of returning these materials into the circular economy."

— Chad Pawson