Novex Transportation Case Study

Novex is a medium-sized business which has implemented simple costeffective environmental solutions with involvement at all levels of business: from customers to drivers. Building awareness and understanding of the benefits of being eco-efficient, was the first step in engaging its Novexs staff and drivers. The company has found that as a result of Novex Clean, staff morale has improved as well as productivity. To check out the Novex Case study done by the GVRD, follow the link below.
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Global warming and biodiversity.

According to an International study done by the University of Leeds, global warming could wipe out a quarter of all species of plants and animals on Earth by 2050 in one of the biggest mass extinctions since the dinosaurs. The United Nations said the report highlighting threats to creatures ranging from Australian butterflies to Spanish eagles, showed a need for the world to back the Kyoto Protocol, meant to brake rising temperatures linked to human pollution. “A quarter of all species of plants and land animals, or more than a million in all, could be driven to extinction, said Chris Thomas, professor of Conservation Biology at England’s University of Leeds. Prof. Thomas, lead author of the study published in the science journal Nature, said the emissions from cars and factories could push temperatures by the end of the century up to levels not seen for one million to 30 million years. The survey, the largest of its kind to date, studied global warming links to 1,103 species of plants, mammals, birds, reptiles, frogs and insects in South Africa, Brazil, Europe, Australia, Mexico ‘and Costa Rica and extrapolated findings as far as 2050. It did not examine the oceans. “Climate change is the biggest new extinction threat, co-author Lee Hannah said at Conservation International in Washington. Many species would simply be unable to adapt or migrate to new habitats. The researchers concede there are many uncertainties in both climate forecasts and the computer models they used to forecast future extinctions. But they said their dire conclusions may well come to pass if industrial nations do not curtail emissions of greenhouse gases.
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Impact of Climate Change on Canadian Weather

A report from environment Canada inventories the extreme events and bizarre weather occuring in Canada as a result of climate change. The report concludes: “Although Canadians are good at coping with punishing weather they may be no match for what nature will throw at us”
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Energy Supply and Pricing for a Sustainable Future

On the reality of the world (and Canadian) oil supply and how it should be translated into a new pricing policy in Canada while it is still time to adjust to the fact that we are running out of cheap energy. Paper by William E. Rees, PhD, University of British Columbia, School of Community and Regional Planning.
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Good News for a Change: How Everyday People are Helping the Planet

Author: Dr. David Suzuki, and Holly Dressel Publisher: Greystone and the David Suzuki Foundation Inspiring stories about the people who are making positive environmental and social contributions to our world, illustrating the hundreds of working solutions that can help all of us to achieve a better future.
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Solar Manifesto

In the decade since the ‘Earth Summit’ in Rio de Janeiro, the response of the world’s governments and authorities to the threats to the global environment has been to enforce the reduction of energy consumption and harmful emissions – solulions primarily based around conventional energy resources and conventional thinking. The question is, though, whether this strategy is radical enough to address the key challenges now facing the environment, and whether it can be effective in avoiding catastrophe on a global scale. For Herman Scheer, the answer is a definite no. In this fully updated edition of A Solar Manifesto, he once more attacks the lack of political will to find answers outside a conventional frame of reference. Climate change, pollution, deforestation, destruction of the ozone layer, poverty and the population explosion are all problems created or exacerbated by the use of conventional energy. Seven years after the first edition of this book, answers are now more urgently required than ever, as current policies serve merely to alleviate the escalating symptoms rather than attempting a cure for what could become a terminal affliction. Herman Scheer shows that this crisis may yet be reversed – but it can only be made to happen through a fundamental change in political and economic strategies, paving the way towards a global solar energy economy sustained by new social principles. A Solar Manifesto champions the replacement of fossil and nuclear fuels with solar energy, as a real solution to the threat to the environment and associated social consequences. Scheer constructs a radical yet innovative political and economic model and argues the case with passion and conviction for the global solar economy as the route to a sustainable environment. Thought-provoking and profoundly challenging, this book will be an inspiration to anyone concerned with energy and the global environment.
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The Selfish Gene

This book should be read almost as though it were science fiction. It is designed to appeal to the imagination. But it is not science fiction: it is science. Cliché or not, ‘stranger than fiction’ expresses often how the truth is felt. We are survival machines-robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. As Richard Dawkins writes in his introduction: this is a truth, which still fills him with astonishment. Dawkins explains the arduous theory of evolution with great simplicity and expresses his ideas in a way that non-scientists can understand. In this book he also introduce the notion of meme, a self-replicating ‘cultural gene’, which leads to he concept of (human) cultural evolution versus natural evolution and the hope that humanity is more than just a mechanism for replicating DNA molecules.
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Biomimicry

Biomimicry is a revolutionary new science that analyzes nature’s best ideas-spider silk and prairie grass, seashells and brain cells-and adapts them for human use. Science writer and lecturer Janine Benyus takes us into the lab and out in the field with the maverick researchers who are applying nature’s ingenious solutions to the problem of human survival: stirring vats of proteins to unleash their signaling power in computers; analyzing how spiders manufacture a waterproof fiber five times stronger than steel; studying how electrons in a leaf cell convert sunlight to fuel in trillionths of a second; discovering miracle drugs by observing what anima1s eat-and much more. The products of biomimicry are things we can all use-medicines, “smart” computers, super-strong materials, profitable and earth-friendly business. Biomimicry eloquently shows that the answers are all around us.
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Stupid White Men

Michael Moore’s critic of today’s USA is refreshing and very entertaining. Remember when everything was looking up? Then the government was running at a surplus, pollution was disappearing, peace was breaking out in the Middle East and Northern Ireland, and the Bridge to the Twenty-first Century was strung with highspeed Internet Cable. Well, so much for the future. Michael Moore the award-winning provocateur size up the new century and that big ugly special-interest group thats laying the waste to the world as we know it: Stupid White Men. In his book, Michael Moore will use well-documented facts and data to explain why: – The election of the current US president was in fact a coup. – You should never take a plane in the US – It is still bad to be black – US is an uneducated (and therefore idiot) nation – Everyone is the greatest threat to the environment – The end of men is near – America is one big happy prison
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Plan B

Modern civilization is in trouble. We have created a bubble economy, one whose output is artificially inflated by overconsuming the earth’s natural capital. Nowhere is the bubble economy more evident than in the food sector where the world grain harvest has been inflated by overpumping aquifers, a practice that virtually guarantees a future drop in production when aquifers are depleted. The wakeup call may come soon. In China, where water shortages are already shrinking the food supply, the grain harvest has fallen from 392 million tons in 1999 to 340 million tons in 2003. Within the next year or two as its grain reserves are depleted, China’s 1.3 billion consumers will begin competing with U.S. consumers for U.S. grain. Given China’s trade surplus with the United States of over $80 billion and strong buying power, this has the potential to drive up food prices worldwide. The resulting political instability in food-importing countries may convince us that business as usual-Plan A-is no longer a viable option. The alternative is Plan B-a worldwide mobilization to stabilize population and climate before these issues spiral out of control. The goal is to stabilize population close to the United Nations’ low projection of 7.4 billion, to reduce carbon emissions by half by 2015, and to raise water productivity by half. Lester Brown puts forth a workable blueprint that can be enacted now. Plan B: Rescuing a Planet under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble is a way of sustaining economic progress worldwide, an alternative to continuing environmental deterioration and eventual economic decline.
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