Community Leaders & Books: October 2025

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: Broken toaster? Wobbly chair? Jacket with a stubborn zipper? Bring it to a Repair Café near you! Skilled volunteers will be on hand to help you fix, mend, and tinker. There were Repair Cafés in 5 Saskatchewan communities in October. [Saskatchewan Waste Reduction Council]

Alberta: Cory Olson, Wildlife Conservation Society of Canada, presented the natural history of Alberta’s bats on a Nature Alberta webinar. [Wildlife Conservation Society of Canada, Alberta Bats]

Manitoba: Oak Hammock Marsh holds monthly public astronomy nights. The November 20 topic is meteors and comets: the solar system visitors to our skies. [Oak Hammock Marsh]

British Columbia: Wildwood EcoForest, Vancouver Island, is home to selective tree harvesting, intact ecosystems, old growth trees, and wildlife. An 8.5 hectare site featuring meadows, a stone escarpment, and a section of rare old-growth coastal Douglas fir has recently been added to the forest. [The Discourse]

Saskatchewan: Friends of the Saskatoon Afforestation Areas is a non-profit environmental charity dedicated to protecting and enhancing the Richard St Barbe Baker Afforestation Area and George Genereux Urban Regional Park in Saskatoon. They have been hosting a series of webinars. There will be one on The Role of Biodiversity in Ecosystem Resilience on November 20. [Friends of the Saskatoon Afforestation Areas]

Books

Shade: The Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource by Sam Bloch: “There is still no technology known to man that cools the outdoors as effectively as a tree. These communal parasols are also misting machines that cool the air … Shade’s fall from favor has paralleled and fueled the destruction of the global climate. If we reintegrate shade into our daily lives in small and big ways, the impacts could be thorough and profound – from a subtle return to a life outside, to the slowing of warming and the righting of social wrongs.”

The overall prize-winner in this year’s Bird Photographer of the Year is Liron Gertsman, a nature photographer and conservation photojournalist based in BC.

It’s informative. It’s funny, and it recognizes human weaknesses. Perhaps it can save the planet: World Without End: An Illustrated Guide to the Climate Crisis by Jean-Marc Jancovici & Christophe Blain.

Bringing Up Beaver, John Aberth: “Why do I rehab beavers? Because you save a beaver, and you save the world – a whole world of wildlife that thrives in a beaver-managed ecosystem unlike any other.”

Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash, Alexander Clapp: “How did we get to a world in which a plastic bag placed in a recycling bin in the United Kingdom becomes the bane of a Kurdish farmer three thousand miles away in Turkey? … The more trash rich countries have sent away over the last forty years, the more trash they have continued to produce. And yet few citizens of the Netherlands or Canada would necessarily know to see it like this. For the waste that travels across the globe and often inflicts irreversible damage is not the trash that – to so much chagrin – goes into the garbage bin and then the local landfill. It’s the stuff you place in the recycling bin in the conviction that doing so is helping the planet.”

Nature Companion

Canadian Toads hibernate underground below the frost line in burrows they've dug using the bony lumps on their rear legs. (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/30418022746

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.