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Good afternoon, and welcome to Globe Climate, a newsletter about climate change, environment and resources in Canada.
Before he was known as the “One-Man Jukebox,” a summer of tree-planting made Ron Sexsmith a songwriter.
As the weather heats up, prominent Canadians tell us about their first summer jobs for a new series from The Globe. In this week’s “How I Spent My Summer,” the 61-year-old rocker tells us how planting trees made him a musician proper.
Now, let’s catch you up on other news.
Noteworthy reporting this week:
- Smoke: Over the weekend, Montreal air quality ranked worst in the world due to Prairie wildfire smoke
- World Court: In landmark opinion, top UN court says nations must meet climate obligations
- Analysis: Ottawa pressed to drop oil and gas emissions cap for stronger industrial carbon pricing
- Pipelines: Majority of Canadians support building new oil infrastructure, poll shows
- Electric vehicles: Ottawa in talks with automakers over EV sales mandates, Joly says
- Politics: Carney taps Inuk leader Virginia Mearns as Arctic ambassador for Canada
- Health: Doctors are prescribing nature – but we don’t know how it works
- Food: The quest to make vegan salmon that tastes – and flakes – like the real thing
- First person: Birding is the most exciting scavenger hunt nature has to offer
- Opinion from The Narwhal: I was at the First Nations C-5 summit. Carney isn’t listening
A deeper dive
A visitor stops to look through a magnifying glass on the 'This Humid House' installation by Tabula Rosa on May 20, in London.Leon Neal/Getty Images
Can loving flowers save the planet?
For this week’s deeper dive, an excerpt from an opinion story titled: Beauty can be a refuge in this hard and ugly world – but it can serve a greater purpose, too. Written by Sonia Sedivy, a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto Scarborough.
If a thing of beauty is a joy forever, the stunning Royal Horticultural Society’s Chelsea Flower Show is proof that beauty can be of the moment and practical, too, changing with our evolving needs and concerns. Each garden, exhibit or plant at Chelsea implements important environmental functions with a new, gorgeous naturalism that delivers the powerful message at the heart of the show: Even with just a container or two, we all have the ability to make incremental, much-needed contributions to help mitigate the harmful effects of climate change. That idea has clearly taken root in Britain – that beauty isn’t necessarily a frill or a distraction, but actually a driver of change – and it should be allowed to bloom here in Canada, too.
There is no question that our aesthetic experiences – and experiences of beauty, if we are lucky – and the things they engage with are an enormous part of human life.
This brings us back to gardens, which have united beauty with function as a core part of human life since ancient times. Indigenous medicine wheel gardens and kitchen gardens lay out medicinal plants, edibles and flowers in formal designs. English cottage gardens informally mix flowers and edibles in dense profusion. In hot climates, walled courtyard gardens around a central water feature provide cool respite.
The WaterAid Garden designed by Tom Massey and Je Ahn. In support of WaterAid.Neil Hepworth/Royal Horticultural Society
But now, with the climate emergency, gardens have a new and important responsibility: helping local ecosystems sustain their functioning and biodiversity while also helping them be resilient to the stresses of climate change. Community organizations and commercial nurseries have joined in this mission, attempting to share ecological gardening practices and information about which plants are native or pollinator-friendly and how to replace pesticide use.
But Chelsea does what no amount of verbal information can: We experience gardens that are beautiful and ecological in every respect. In their beauty, the gardens inspire us to change by offering concrete takeaways about the latest ideas and techniques. They teach us without making us feel like we are being taught.
Recent show gardens focus on innovative solutions for supporting local insect populations, especially pollinators, and for withstanding the droughts and torrential downpours that come with a changing, warming climate, without putting more strain on public water supply. Each show garden now includes a water feature such as a reservoir for storing rainwater and dispersing it in small ponds and rills that foster wildlife as well as plants.
This excerpt has been edited for length and clarity.
What else you missed
- Global oil and gas emissions standard reportedly paused after Shell, others quit
- Mayor of Newfoundland town among volunteer firefighters missing work to battle wildfire
- EU, China agree to take action on climate change during a tense summit in Beijing
- Brutal heat making outdoor labour in southern Europe’s tourist spots unsafe for workers
Opinion and analysis
Michael Byers: The International Court of Justice’s statement on fossil fuels puts Carney in a tough spot
Gary Mason: The electric vehicle industry in Canada is losing power. It’s time to recharge it.
Thomas Verny: Cells are the smallest, most basic unit of life. Do they also hold memories?
Green Investing
The Port of Churchill is ready for its global shipping moment, CEO says
Now, driven by the trade tension, expanding the operation in Churchill, Man., on Hudson Bay has taken on new urgency, and become a focus in national discussions about spending billions of dollars on projects that diversify markets and contribute to economic resilience, said the head of the company that owns the port and railway that serves it.
Arctic Gateway Group, owned by 29 First Nations as well as local governments in Manitoba and Nunavut, has upgraded the rail and port facilities. With climate change, the shipping season, currently about four months annually, is lengthening.
- Caisse invests up to $3.2-billion in Sizewell C nuclear plant in U.K.
- Switch to renewable energy hits global tipping point for even lower costs, UN says
The Climate Exchange
We’ve launched the next chapter of The Climate Exchange, an interactive, digital hub where The Globe answers your most pressing questions about climate change. More than 300 questions were submitted as of September. The first batch of answers tackles 30 of them. They can be found with the help of a search tool developed by The Globe that makes use of artificial intelligence to match readers’ questions with the closest answer drafted. We plan to answer a total of 75 questions.
Photo of the week
People block a road as they protest water shortages and the drying up of rivers, in the Al-Majriya area of central Iraq's Hilla city on July 25. Hundreds protested severe water shortages exacerbated by the summer's sweltering heat in the central province of Babylon, an AFP correspondent said, as Iraq, and its 46 million inhabitants, have been intensely impacted by the effects of climate change, experiencing rising temperatures, year-on-year droughts and reduced river flows.KARRAR JABBAR/AFP/Getty Images
Guides and Explainers
- Want to learn to invest sustainably? We have a class for that: Green Investing 101 newsletter course for the climate-conscious investor. Not sure you need help? Take our quiz to challenge your knowledge.
- We’ve rounded up our reporters’ content to help you learn about what a carbon tax is, what happened at COP29 and just generally how Canada will change because of climate change.
- We have ways to make your travelling more sustainable, and if you like to read, here are books to help the environmentalist in you grow, as well as a downloadable e-book of Micro Skills - Little Steps to Big Change.
Catch up on Globe Climate
- A park to remind us about the past, and the future
- In the fires, after the floods
- Another tick-infested summer
- From loss to life
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