New Challenges

Growing Your Own Food

I will grow more of my own food this growing season. 
The many benefits of growing your own food include eating fresh produce, supporting local wildlife, exercise, and saving money.  12 Benefits Of Growing Your Own Food 

It’s time to plan for the 2024 growing season.

Browsing through the many seed catalogues available is a great way to get inspiration. Many are available online; you don’t need to order a paper copy. Seeds can be delivered to your door by Canada Post (see lists in the links below).  Seeds are also available in many local stores. 

If you have never tried to grow your own food, this may be the year to give it a try, even if it’s just a few herbs in a window box. If you have access to a larger space, talk to locals about what grows well in your area and when to plant. 

Don’t spring into garden clean up too soon though. 

Butterflies, bees, pollinators, and other beneficial insects overwinter in the dead leaves and hollowed out stems of last year’s plants, and it is important not to disturb them until temperatures are consistently above 10°C. Insects are a vital part of a balanced ecosystem and seed heads can serve as a valuable early food source for birds.

Resources:

Where can I get seed:

More from past challenges:

Repair Your Broken Stuff

I will, repair my broken stuff.  Fact: 96% of independent repair shops surveyed turn customers away because of manufacturers’ repair restrictions. Access to parts, tools, and repair information should be fair and affordable.
Source: Repair is freedom – iFixit

Porché Brinker plays violin in the Oscar-nominated “The Last Repair Shop”, which tells the story of technicians who repair public school musical instruments in Los Angeles and the kids who play them.

“Repair Everything” first appeared in our January 7, 2021 newsletter and we have returned to the issue several times. See the links below. We should have the right to repair things we buy, whether that means taking it to a repair shop or fixing it ourselves. The Right to Repair movement is a broad international effort to secure our repair options and to prevent repair limitations. 

Right to Repair laws have three main goals:
 – allowing us the right to open our stuff
 – increasing the availability of the parts and tools needed for repair
 – keeping independent repair shops in business 

Canada needs right to repair legislation. It will keep stuff out of landfills, reduce the need for new raw materials, save consumers money, and create jobs. Fixing something that’s broken gives a sense of accomplishment; refurbishing something you love feels good. 

A Feel-Good Movie

Watch The Last Repair Shop, now streaming for free on YouTube. Nominated for Best Documentary Short 2024 Academy Awards.  40 minutes

Resources:

And from past Community Carbon Challenges:

Let’s talk!

I will talk about climate change with family and friends.
“Talking about climate change requires honesty and connection. Every single person already has every reason they need to care about climate change.” Katharine Hayhoe

In her November 2018 TED Talk Katherine Hayhoe told us the most important thing you can do to fight climate change is talk about it.

Conversations about climate change can often become heated or just dead-end. Most people who are labelled as climate change deniers aren’t actually deniers at all — they are feeling isolated or just have questions. The key to having a real discussion is to connect over shared values, family, community, nature — and to prompt people to realize that they already care about a changing climate.

“I learned how much of people’s emotion around climate change is rooted in feeling isolated…A lot of the conversation about climate change places the power out there—but the power to make change happen is actually in our conversations, in our relationships, and in our towns. It’s in our hands, more than we believe.” –  Kate Schapira, Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth

Resources

A Safe and Just Space for Humanity

Photo Credit Leaving No One Behind

I will learn how to live within the means of a living planet.  
A safe and just space for humanity lies between an ecological ceiling which ensures humanity does not overshoot what our planet can handle and a social foundation that ensures no one is left behind. AKA “Doughnut Economics.” About Doughnut Economics

Be a sharer, repairer, regenerator, a steward of natural habitat. Reduce waste, buy local, eat less meat, minimize travel, fly less, be climate and energy smart.

An Ecological Ceiling

“We don’t know how long we can keep breaching these key boundaries before combined pressures lead to irreversible change and harm.” Johan Rockström

We can and we must pull back from these planetary boundaries by switching to renewable energy sources, reducing pollution, recycling critical minerals, preserving biodiversity, adapting regenerative agriculture practices, shifting to a circular economy…  COP28: The Transformation Remains Unstoppable

A Social Foundation

If we look only at ecological limits, we risk leaving the most vulnerable behind. A just transition requires that we establish a social foundation below which no one falls. Leaving No One Behind.

Our goal must be to meet the needs of all humanity within the means of the living planet and to insure a safe and just space for future generations.  

More Resources

A new challenge will appear in our weekly newsletter every few weeks

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Here’s a list of all previous New Challenges:

  1. Growing Your Own Food
  2. Repair Your Broken Stuff
  3. Let’s Talk
  4. A Safe and Just Space for Humanity
  5. Learn about Planetary Boundaries
  6. Individual Climate Action Matters: Use your influence
  7. Heat pumps are the most efficient heating technology ever invented.
  8. Scientists understood the physics of climate change in the 1800s
  9. Nature Nurtures
  10. Fossil Fuels, Petrochemicals and Plastic
  11. Say No To Peat
  12. Re-examine your fossil fuel-free transportation options
  13. Food and Farmland
  14. Imagine a fossil fuel free future
  15. Preserve Biodiversity – Nurture ‘Everyday Awe’
  16. Community Carbon Challenge – 2023
  17. Municipal Election
  18. Preserve Your Own Food
  19. Nature-based Solutions
  20. Grow your own food | Buy locally grown |
    Eat in season.
  21. “Silent Spring“ –  2022
  22. Efficiency without sufficiency is lost
  23. Get Outside — Spring Edition
  24. Talk To Your Kids About the Climate Crisis
  25. Yes, heat pumps work in winter in Canada!
  26. Think Globally – Act Locally
  27. Winter Recreation – Get Outside
  28. Repair Everything II
  29. New Year’s 2022 — CO2, A Direct Result of Consumption
  30. A Climate Christmas Carol
  31. I will work to further reduce my Carbon Footprint
  32. Get Creative to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint This Holiday Season
  33. A Stitch In Time – Mend Your Clothes
  34. Break the Idling Habit
  35. Don’t Upgrade Your Phone (Yet)
  36. Going On a Picnic…
  37. Support the Circular Economy
  38. A Call to Action at Every Level
  39. Choose People-Powered Recreational Vehicles
  40. Restore the Dark Sky
  41. Active Transportation in Muskoka
  42. Carbon Drawdown – Rewilding
  43. The Carbon Footprint of Your Refrigerator
  44. The Carbon Footprint of Your Next Vehicle
  45. The Carbon Footprint of Food – Bonus “Quick N Delish”
  46. Grow Your Own Vegetables
  47. Shop Local – Reduce Your Carbon Footprint
  48. Repair Everything
  49. The Carbon Footprint of Getting Dressed
  50. The Footprint of Food Packaging
  51. Energy Vampires
  52. The Impact of Tires on Your Carbon Footprint and Your Health

Return to the Community Carbon Challenge – here

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