Community Leaders & Books: March 2026

We profile local community leaders and post book reviews on a weekly basis on social media, along with excerpts from Nature Companion, our nature app/website. Once a month we repost these items on our website for those of you who may not be active on social media.

Community Leaders

Saskatchewan: For Peat’s Sake: Protecting Northern Saskatchewan’s Muskegs hosted an afternoon of learning exploring the vital peatland ecosystems with Bryan Mood, forest ecologist & climate scientist. Participants created a peat-free soil mixture with Elizabeth Bekolay. [For Peat’s Sake]

Alberta: Calgary’s Inglewood Bird Sanctuary offers a forest bathing trail with seasonal ‘invitations’ from a Forest Therapy Guide to connect more deeply with nature. [City of Calgary]

Manitoba: Youth Climate Lab and Camino Manitoba are hosting a Climate Action Community Retreat from April 17-19. [Youth Climate Lab]

British Columbia: The Fraser River Discovery Centre offered 16+ participants the opportunity to step into the shoes of an ecologist and explore the urban forest up close at Mundy Park, New Westminster, from 2-4 pm, March 28. [Raincoast Conservation Foundation]

Books

Nature’s Genius: Evolution’s Lessons for a Changing Planet by David Farrier: “On every planet except Antarctica, animals, plants and insects are altering their bodies and behaviours in response to the pressures of transformed ecosystems and a changing climate … Our fingerprints are everywhere: in birds that forget their songs, in city-dwelling spiders weaving new web patterns, and in elephants born without tusks to escape the murderous attention of hunters. Human civilization is now the world’s greatest evolutionary force.”

Clamor: How Noise Took Over the World and How We Can Take It Back by Chris Berdik: “Noise has been pigeonholed as a nuisance or personal grievance, despite increasingly robust evidence that it’s a serious and growing threat to public health. This book is a call to finally take noise seriously, not by complaining more stridently about it but by broadening our understanding of the problem and expanding the battle beyond decibel counts. Only then can we devise smarter solutions to today’s noise, better avoid noise in the future, and even strive to make our world sound better, not just less bad.”

More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz: “Thanks to the transition theory, climate change calls for a change of technology, not a change of civilization. The history of energy, its chronological routines, its stagist narratives of the past – the age of wood, the age of coal, the age of oil, the organic economy and the mineral economy, the first and second industrial revolutions – has played a discreet but central role in the creation of this comforting future … After two centuries of ‘energy transitions’, humanity has never burned so much oil and gas, so much coal and so much wood. Wood currently provides twice as much energy as nuclear fission, twice as much as hydroelectricity, and twice as much as solar and wind power combined.”

The Genius Bat: The Secret Life of the Only Flying Mammal by Yossi Yovel: “In this book, I set out to reveal the world of bats from the perspective of those who study them. If you think that bats are just scary flying creatures, or, even worse, bloodthirsty carriers of disease, I am about to change your mind … We’ve attached more than one thousand GPS devices to more than ten species of bats in more than ten countries on every possible continent except Antarctica, all with one objective – to understand what it’s like to be a bat.”

Nature Companion

Common Mergansers are excellent divers. Their beaks have serrated edges that help them to hold onto fish. (Nature Companion is a free app/website introducing many of the plants and animals found in Canada’s four western provinces.)

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/apmckinlay/52584089861

EcoFriendly West informs and encourages initiatives that support Western Canada’s natural environment through its online publication and the Nature Companion website/app. Like us on Facebook, follow us on BlueSky, X, and Mastodon, or subscribe by email.