Community Leaders & Books: September 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: Buffalo Pound Lake provides drinking water for 25% of Saskatchewan’s population. Buoys with sensors provide real-time data on the quality of the water. A new self-guided Science Walk highlights the research happening at the lake. [USask]

Alberta: Friends of Fish Creek Provincial Park Society offers an 8-week Nature Walking Through Grief and Loss program, an opportunity for participants to connect with nature while connecting with others who share similar experiences. [Friends of Fish Creek]

Manitoba: Dr. Melanie Dennis Unrau, co-editor of I’ll Get Right On It: Poems on Working Life in the Climate Crisis and Writer-in-Residence at the University of Manitoba’s Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture, led a community poetry workshop exploring the theme of labour and vocation in the time of climate emergency on September 25. [UManitoba]

British Columbia: Wildsight Golden is holding a festival of environmental and adventure films from around the world at 7 pm, October 17. Organizers hope that the festival will connect people through stories that celebrate the beauty of our planet and inspire action to preserve it. [Wildsight Golden]

Books

Intraterrestrials: Discovering the Strangest Life on Earth, Karen G. Lloyd: “For much of my life, I have been tracking the strange types of microbes that live at the bottom of the oceans, inside volcanoes, and deep within the Arctic permafrost … Without the sun, where do these creatures get energy? Without oxygen, what do they breathe? And how long, exactly, can any organism survive in harsh environments, where pH ranges from pure acid to pure alkaline? The answers to these questions – they get energy from chemical reactions, breathe rocks, and sometimes live for thousands or perhaps millions of years – will demonstrate that our assumptions about the boundaries of life, based on our narrow experience of living in the thin green layer at Earth’s surface, are often wrong.”

The Internet of Animals: Discovering the Collective Intelligence of Life on Earth, Martin Wikelski: What do animals know that we don’t? How do elephants detect tsunamis before they happen? How do birds predict hurricanes? In The Internet of Animals, Martin Wikelski argues that animals possess a unique ‘sixth sense’ that humans are only beginning to grasp. He says, “It is within our reach to communicate with animals, and the messages we receive from them have the potential to change our human trajectory into the future for the better.”

Consumed: How Big Brands Got Us Hooked on Plastics, Saabira Chaudhuri: Petrochemical companies have molded consumers to embrace the convenience and disposability of plastics — no matter the environmental and public health costs. However, consumers have an immense amount of power “to influence what consumer goods companies do by either buying or not buying their products, by speaking to them”.

Here Comes the Sun, Bill McKibben: “Right now, really for the first time, I can see a path forward. A path lit by the sun … And it’s a path not just out of the climate crisis – it’s a path that opens into a very new world.” “The world has exactly one path available to make the rapid changes that the climate crisis requires, and that path is sun, wind, and batteries. They are available right now, in scale, at affordable price. And they can provide almost everything we need.”

Nature Companion

Ladybugs defend themselves from predators by playing dead and secreting a fluid with a nasty taste and smell from their leg joints. (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/24918093277

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.