Fall conference: North American Association for Environmental Education Conference

Susan attended the October NAAEE conference 2014 as a Community Climate Change Fellow.  She gave presentations on Co-design youth work along with other educators in the fellowship.  Many thanks to the NAAEE, EPA, EE Capacity and Cornell University for this amazing opportunity to meet with environmental educators.

Ecology and Codesign

Architecture and planning, ideally,  supports a great diversity of integrated human activity.  Stanley's co-design is about sensitively inquiring into a citizen's round of life and their desired environmental stimuli.  As an educator, I help youth respond to their environment by experiencing it as organisms within a living ecological system.

Together, we are currently developing methods to fine tune the connection between ecology and co-design.   I prepared some graphics to illustrate some ecological principles for teens so that codesigning their environment can be a part of their ecological education.  Some basic ecological concepts are illustrated below.

Biodiverse-City at the Beaty Museum

Beaty Biodiversity Museum had their Urban Festival today. Their flagship specimen is an enormous blue whale skeleton.   Imagine your city respects biodiversity.  What would you be doing? Families, teens, toddlers, and fellow Beaty volunteers co-designed "biodiverse-city".  Two 17 year old visitors from Ontario expressed great concern for their ecological future.  They were interested in biology, ecology and art. One drew a mermaid on the "Day in the Life" timeline.  The conversation made me reflect on how a combination of passion, leadership, creativity and technical expertise will be required of youth to face challenges they never chose for themselves.  They were fascinated by the museum, biodiversity and the challenge of designing a biodiverse-city.  

 

thoughts on David Owen's Lecture: Why Manhattan is the Greenest City in North America

Co-design attended David Owen's lecture in Vancouver.  A summary of Owen's ideas can be found in his blog here, and in the New Yorker article here.  Owen argues that dense urban centres are an effective alternative to sprawl for preserving farmland and ecological habitats.  And  "living smaller, closer, driving less" reduces our carbon footprint.  While this is true, I'm not convinced that density on the scale of NYC is a green solution.   

If high-density urban centres preserve earth's wilderness and farmland by virtue of avoidance, then this solution might be even more green than NYC:  

Moon base Alpha

Density is an efficient solution but is it ecological?  Ecological systems are self supporting. Take into consideration the following factors: living plants and animals forming the food source, waste absorbed by the landscape;  inhabitant's psychological need for light and green space...  If we now draw a radius from NYC , what would be the extent of the circle?

The Urban Tsunami

Gapminder's mild mannered Hans Rosling, demonstrates the  scary world trend towards urbanization. It's pretty hard to miss in his unveiling of the "truth through statistics". Can we, as a species, design ourselves out of needing more than one earth?   The ecological challenges due to urbanization requires  an unprecedented collaborative effort from architects, engineers, landscape architects -  a charrette of epic proportions.  It's also an educational challenge for teachers to prepare our youth for the future.
The design solution lies not in buildings, energy efficient cars, gadgets, but the redesign and re-imagining of a life.