H2O: Ideas & Action for Canada's Water

I was excited to open the Globe and Mail on Friday Feb.17 to read the headline “A Modest Proposal: Save the World” which provided details on a plan to wean us off fossil fuels. It offers easy to understand information from the Equinox Blueprint, a report put together by a group of scientists, business people and policy analysts organized by the Waterloo Global Science Initiative. I’m always looking for positive, proactive approaches to the major challenges we’re facing with climate change and this blueprint is exactly that.

Planet Earth -image courtesy of NASA

So you might wonder why I’m writing about this in a blog about water and in particular the Lake Winnipeg Watershed. The Lake Winnipeg Foundation has recently adopted a position statement on Climate Change that provides the answer to this question. Essentially they are pointing out that changes in rainfall, runoff, evaporation, number of ice-free days on the lake, flooding, and drought are impacting the lake’s eco-system.The increasing water temperatures are contributing to the proliferation of toxic blue green algae and to invertebrate species changes which ultimately influence the Lake Winnipeg fish community. So anything that can be done to slow down the overall warming of the planet, will benefit Lake Winnipeg.

Many times, I hear people express a sense of being overwhelmed when the topic of climate change comes up. It seems so huge and so “out of our control”. That is why when I see the media publicizing something like the Equinox Blueprint which offers a real plan for how to get going, I am greatly encouraged. We humans do have an innate discomfort with making major changes but history has proven that we are very capable of doing so. I hope we can get moving now on making the major shift from fossil fuels to alternative energies. I believe there are more benefits than we can imagine.