Read 10 Questions for Environmentalists from July’s Alberta Views here. Join the discussion at http://10bigquestions.blogspot.com.

Of his bones are coral made:/
Those are pearls that were his eyes:/
Nothing of him that doth fade,/
But doth suffer a sea change

Shakespeare, Tempest 1,ii,403

Sea Change

1. A marked or profound transformation.
2. A notable or unexpected transformation (with reference to Shakespeare’s Tempest).

We are losing. We’re losing what we love about Canada: our wild places and the wildlife that live there; our clean air and clean water; safe places for our children to play; our civil rights; our freedoms; our dignity. We know we are losing. What are we going to do about it?

In 1999 I worked with my colleague and high school acquaintance, Kevin Scott, to create an organization that would shake Canada’s conservation community up a little. We worried that as a movement we had become too slow, too timid, not strategic enough to win the conservation battles we faced at the time. Wildcanada.net was created as a way to provide Canadians with better access to their decision makers, and with up-to-date information on the decisions they were making. We used online technology to build a network of activists in every electoral riding in Canada, putting people from these ridings in touch in a regular basis with their elected officials. To a degree, it is a success.

But now I realize that what frustrated me in 1999 wasn’t solved simply by introducing a “delivery” mechanism and network building effort to the conservation movement via Wildcanada.net, and later to Canada’s broader civil society efforts via ActionWorks.ca. In fact, my frustration has grown since 1999. What troubles me is this:

1. We are losing; and
2. Though we know we’re losing, we just keep on doing things the same way that we’ve been doing them for the last 30 or more years, hoping that they turn out differently.

And so for the next five years, via my work through Highwater Mark, I am dedicating my professional life to understanding what we must do to reverse this trend in civil society where we take one step forward but fall two steps back.

I’m starting by posing a set of questions and inviting debate on them. Maybe you’ll have some questions of your own to add. And then I’m going to go out and find leaders, organizations, and ethically driven businesses that want to answer those questions and institutionalize the answers, so doing my part to help build a civil society that is able to confront the challenges that we face today -- and will face tomorrow - with courage, skill, and a much higher likelihood of success.

12 Questions for a Sea Change >