Need Eco-Inspiration? 5 Women Who’ve Implemented Bright Ideas Share Their Best Advice

What I’ve learned from… getting toddlers to eat their veggies

Michèle Nadeau, executive director of YWCA Moncton

How people eat is none of my business. I did start to think, though, that there was more that the YWCA as an organization could be doing to lessen our carbon footprint—and that if we wanted to say that we care about children, we had to care if they have a planet in the future. And then the new Canada’s Food Guide [promoting] came out last year and I was thrilled: It seemed like the perfect opportunity to plant seeds with parents about going plant-based at the daycare.

I really believe in including people in the decision-making process: nothing about us, without us. We started by removing milk from the beverage list. Before we made any more significant dietary changes, we had an open house with a big kitchen party so that parents could taste what their children would eat. We had three different soups, a chickpea pot pie, vegan mac and cheese, energy balls made with different grains and nut butters, fresh vegetables with hummus, tons of muffins. We answered every question. We told parents who were concerned about picky eaters that they could pack a lunch for their kids. I’ve been plant- based for eight years and studied holistic vegan nutrition, so I assured them the menu would have all the proteins kids need. 

We also changed how our educators interact with the kids during meal times. Now, we sit down with the children and encourage them to smell and touch the meals, to talk about what’s in there, where vegetables come from, how the food gets made. Children are all about exploring, so we’ve made it a really sensory experience. But we did go gradually and have foods that were familiar to them—their palates were already used to certain tastes, textures and flavours, so we wanted to mimic that as much as possible. After milk, we removed cheese. Then we moved on to meat. With shepherd’s pie, we took out the ground beef and added lentils, and nobody noticed. Same thing with spaghetti sauce. We weren’t trying to be tricky, we just didn’t want to say, “Brand new menu!” and have nobody eat. Drastic change can cause a strong reaction that is hard to move beyond. And our chef tries to offer other plant-based options, because sometimes the kids won’t like one particular thing but will try something else.

Our footprint isn’t perfect: My heart breaks every garbage day, when I see how much single-use plastic we go through. I’ve challenged myself to bring mesh bags when I buy produce. I want the kids to be aware of their impact on the environment, but I don’t want to lead from a position of fear or stress. Change does take time—we’ve only been fully plant-based since last October—but we’re really patient with them and we don’t give up. 

What I’ve learned from… pushing clean energy in oil country

Binnu Jeyakumar, director of the clean energy program at energy think-tank Pembina Institute in Calgary

My professional life began in power plants over a decade and a half ago; I have fond memories of crawling through power turbines to figure out how we were going to eke out the most electricity. I’m a mechanical engineer by training—I understand technology, I understand spreadsheets, but developing policy is a very different space. It’s an art form. Our goal at Pembina is to advance Canada on climate action while assisting communities in leading healthy lives and making sure the economy is healthy at the same time; it’s a holistic approach to energy transition. So my job is to meet with citizen groups, politicians, industries, physicians and bureaucrats to build solutions with people whose lives are impacted by those decisions.

After we spent years campaigning for Canada to phase out coal-powered electricity—a lot of PowerPoint presentations in windowless rooms—the federal government set emission standards that will result in the phase-out of coal-fired power by 2030. But that will have an impact on towns with coal plants and on the unions whose members are going to lose jobs. My first job was at a coal plant—I know people who are losing their jobs. And so I’ve learned it’s really important to work with people on the ground whose lives are being impacted by energy transition. I don’t sugar-coat it; I don’t pretend this is easy. It’s difficult, but these are problems we can solve by working together.

There is a range of reactions that we hear from workers. Some people are holding onto false hope that coal can continue to exist. Others are looking at enrolling in solar courses or are asking me about the sustainability of the solar industry—that’s how far ahead they’re thinking. People do still ask what happens if the sun doesn’t shine, and combatting that myth about renewables is taking some time. (It’s reliable, even when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing!) I think if we want to be effective in the change we’re creating, we have to hone our storytelling skills.

I’ve been humbled by how much work has been done by workers’ movements before me, and I’m humbled by how much work needs to be done to ensure a just transition: Coal workers can’t simply up and leave to get a wind job elsewhere, so we need to make sure good, sustainable jobs are created locally, and we need to fix social safety-net systems to take care of people as they move into new industries. But I was just at a discussion on community energy in a pub in a rural community 90 minutes from Calgary, at 8:30 p.m. on a Tuesday night, and people were packed in trying to figure out how to create projects in their town with the resources they had available. The urgency around finding solutions has increased.

What I’ve learned from… building tiny houses to block a massive pipeline

Kanahus Manuel, leader with the Tiny House Warriors: Our Land Is Home in unceded Secwepemc territory

In 2016, I drove down to Standing Rock [a] to join the water protectors there [protesting]. They had some builders in from Portland who were going around constructing tiny houses for demonstrators, and they put a house up fast—about four days. The police ended up raiding it. But around the same time, the women warriors in Secwepemc Territory and I were planning how to fight back against the Trans Mountain pipeline in British Columbia. We wanted to block construction by living and breathing and occupying our land, but we never wanted to get arrested. We’re Native; we’ve seen how we’re treated in the court system. It’s not nice.

The warrior women came up with the idea of building tiny houses on wheels, so we could put them in the most strategic place at any given time of the pipeline’s construction—and if the police come with their injunctions and their orders, we can move. The first house was built in 2017 by volunteers using their own tools; Greenpeace donated $2,500 in lumber. We had nothing. Now we have enough solar power that we can do a build anywhere. The panels are donated by [Indigenous] Sacred Earth Solar; we have composting toilets and wood-burning stoves. Our goal is to build 10 tiny houses, and we currently have six: 8.6 feet wide by 16 to 24 feet long, built on trailers and completely fossil fuel–free. My twin sister is an artist, and she pulled together different artists to paint colourful murals on the outside of the houses, pieces that tell stories of our ways, responsibilities and laws.

I’ve said before that “we’re going big by going small,” and that’s because the tiny houses are part of a bigger global movement that we also stand with: alternative housing, minimizing our imprint on the earth, solarizing to minimize energy consumption. When you live out here—right now, I’m in a tiny house at Blue River, B.C., just an inch outside the pipeline’s injunction zone—you have to rely on yourself. We’re about halfway between Vancouver and Edmonton, and people who live in the city are so dependent on systems for garbage removal, for heating, for waste. We want people who volunteer here to think about how to switch to a greener way of living. This year, I want to work with economists to look at how to build an economy that will benefit the earth and not destroy her.

There are a lot of Indigenous people around the world watching what we’re doing—it’s creative, and we’ve been getting requests from people all over, from Minnesota and California to New Zealand, to do the same thing. It was really important to see the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination say in December that the pipelines have to stop without free, prior and informed consent of Indigenous people. Canada has been really sneaky pushing federal frameworks that have extinguished our rights so we’re no longer the decision-makers on our own territory— they’ve forced us on to 0.2 percent of our land base and claimed the other 99.8 percent. So when we say we’re going big, there are big laws and big rights that we have as Indigenous people, and the more we’re seen on the international level, the more Canada can’t hide. The symbol of Tiny House Warriors is a little warrior with a heart. We want people to see that a small group of dedicated women, the fiercest of warriors, can accomplish a lot and bring people together from love—love for the land, for water, for people, for children. That’s the beauty of working with women. We have so much love.

What I’ve learned from…. reimagining North America’s busiest surface transit route

Jacquelyn Hayward, director of transportation project design and management at the City of Toronto

Downtown Toronto’s King Street is a key destination for culture, heritage, retail and finance—it serves the largest concentration of jobs in the entire country. And the streetcar on King is a workhorse, moving 72,000 people a day on what is the busiest surface transit route in North America. It carries more people than subways do in some cities, but it was carrying them in an inefficient way: Because of traffic congestion during peak periods, the streetcar would often be travelling at a walking speed.

We had tinkered with signal timing and extending parking prohibitions, but it didn’t make a transformative change. So in November 2017, the city and the TTC [Toronto] launched a year-long pilot project that restricted traffic for 2.6 km along King Street. At most intersections, vehicles could only turn right—they couldn’t drive through—to provide priority for moving people on transit, make room for curbside patios and public space, and make the street safer for people who walk and bike.

At first, the response was quite polarizing. People were concerned about the impact on emergency services, they wanted to know how out-of-towners would access the theatres, and the response from a small number of the restaurants was quite concerning. [One] We took all of this seriously, and we collected a massive amount of data—including consumer spending, emergency response times and levels of black carbon air pollution during peak hours—to tell the full story of why we were doing this.

Some people referred to King Street as a ghost town. But the data told us that was a mistaken impression. Cars are these loud, big things that have lights on them and take up a lot of space, whereas people don’t make a street feel as busy. We did add incentives for even more people to go to King, though: We discounted parking in adjacent areas, and we partnered with [the] Ritual to encourage people to pick up a meal. We had weekly phone call meetings with stakeholders to get feedback on the ground, and either made changes to address what we were hearing or provided data to contextualize it. But because people were living through this pilot, the most important thing we did is publish detailed monthly data reports. We knew how many eyes were on us, so we were incredibly transparent about what we were finding. And that helped with the why of the project—we showed that, with this relatively small investment, we were able to move more people, reduce the impacts of congestion and be more environmentally efficient. Ridership was up 33 percent during the morning commute and 44 percent in the evening, and the travel time impact on other streets in the downtown core was generally less than a minute.

I feel that you need to offer a good explanation of the why, one that’s relatable to the stakeholders at the table; it helps make debate a little less heated. And I think because we had been telling this story all along—that we could make the street work better, support economic prosperity and improve public space—it was a pretty straightforward decision to recommend that Toronto city council make the project permanent, which it did in 2019. The King Street pilot taught us that our streets can work better for everyone, and that people want choices. They want to walk, bike and take public transit downtown—and that helps our ability to take on progressive urban projects in the future.

What I learned from… steering my city toward a zero-waste future

Laurence Lavigne Lalonde, Montreal city councillor responsible for environmental transition and resilience

The focus of my party, Projet Montréal, has always been on how to live in a city with the lowest impact. So when we won a majority of seats on Montreal city council in 2017, we created a brand new portfolio: ecological transition and resilience. That means my focus is on how we are going to adapt to the reality of climate change. Our landfills are almost full, and it’s absolute nonsense to ask the government for new landfills. We have to find solutions now—we’re almost too late to find solutions.

We decided to be really ambitious. [Like] Montreal is part of C40, which is a global network of cities committed to addressing climate change. C40 issued a declaration asking cities to divert 70 percent of all waste from landfills by 2030, but we decided that we wanted to put everything we could behind this and divert 85 percent of waste by 2030. We have to stop producing things we don’t need.

Earlier this year, the city passed a ban on all plastic bags by the end of 2020—these bags are used on average just 20 minutes, but they survive in the environment for 1,000 years. As part of our five-year plan, we’ve proposed prohibiting grocery stores from dumping food and forbidding clothing and textile stores from throwing out unsold clothes. But the idea is not just to give fines—it’s to find solutions. The impact of the clothing industry is really, really huge on the environment; personally, I try to buy fewer clothes and always clothes made here in Montreal.

Some of our public hearings came out of petitions from citizens: 15,000 Montrealers asked the city to have a public consultation on the plastic-wrapped advertising flyers that arrive in your mailbox. Instead of putting a sticker on your mailbox to opt out, you would put one on to opt in, so no flyers become the default. The response to the consultation’s recommendations should be announced soon. There’s a lot of practical things, like the stickers, that we want to do. But we were also getting letters from schools that said, “The planet is on fire—could you take more action faster, please?” When someone wants to be part of the solution, it’s nonsense not to give them what they want.

We just started a composting program with 22 schools. The kids are trained on composting, and then they go from one class to another to train other kids; they also teach their parents why it’s important and how to do it. When we did this, the kids were so proud; they really thought they had made a difference. I want them to believe that people in positions of power can be on their side. And I want to believe the change we make can inspire other cities. Even though I’m just a city councillor in Montreal, writing a bylaw for a relatively small number of people in the world, it sends out ripples that can be the start of something much bigger—something you could never predict.