On Thursday February 11, over 20 of Vancouver's green businesses and organizations gathered at the Lighthouse, inviting the media and visitors to see how our city is working towards "making green the mainstream". The evening started pretty low-key, with time to walk around and network with the parties present. Food was provided by Potluck Cafe & Catering on eco-friendly plates (made from palm leaves) by Saakori, and the beer flowed freely thanks to Stanley Park Brewery, proudly "Canada's first sustainable brewery". David Ivaz played lovely acoustic music as everyone made their way through the displays, and judging from the fact that I couldn't move around without brushing against another person, a good crowd had shown up for the event--it was encouraging to see so many people involved or interested in Vancouver's green community.
Many local environmental organizations were present, including SPEC, Earthsave Canada, the Wilderness Committee, and our very own EYA. As well, the Vancouver Area Cycling Coalition (VACC) provided handy bike valet service for Greenstreamers coming in on their own wheels. A number of sustainable food-related businesses were represented as well (and provided draw prizes), among them Green Earth Organics, Nature's Path, and Saltspring Coffee. Other notable businesses include the Car Co-op and Vancity, and it was interesting learning about ECO-audit, a unique service that provides personalized recommendations to homes and small businesses on ways to change their resource and lifestyle choices to be more environmentally friendly. As well, I also enjoyed talking to a representative from eatART, an art lab that makes "audacious and improbable large-scale kinetic, robotic, and mechanized sculptures that investigate our human relationship to energy use". Their finished works include a giant robot spider that is the world's first zero-emissions walking vehicle and a colossal solar-powered tricycle.
There were a number of speakers for the night, and Chris Livingstone from EPIC (the Vancouver Sun Sustainable Living Expo taking place in May) started it off by welcoming us all to this "organic party", and introduced Danielle Bedard from Green Earth Organics who helped put Greenstream 2010 together. Danielle gave the crowd a brief picture of how Greenstream was born, and brought up the first speaker, Juvarya Warsi.
Jurvarya, an environmental economist with a background in real estate development, is the strategist for the Lighthouse Sustainable Building Centre, the building Greenstream was being held in. She enthusiastically provided a bit of background about the Lighthouse, a hub for resources on green building. The Lighthouse serves as a gallery space for green building products and technologies complete with a resource library, and its staff are a group of "green professional architects" eager to work with homeowners and developers on building sustainably by providing workshops and consulting services. In fact, architects, engineers and economists from the Lighthouse were involved in the construction of the Olympic Village, and Jurvarya emphasized the collaborative nature of the organization and its projects. The Lighthouse building itself is an example of a structure built completely with sustainable products, and in the collaborative spirit, all the materials were donated and work was done by volunteers. Juvarya noted that the green building industry is growing twice as fast as the building industry overall, a fact much in line with the positive outlook of the event.
The next speaker was Maureen Cureton, the Green Business Manager for Vancity. Maureen provided some examples of Vancity's green initiatives, which include putting money towards green non-profit organizations through its Visa card program, helping provide remote electricity for First Nations communities along the coast, and cradle-to-cradle product management within the business by using office chairs made from 100% recycled materials. She then encouraged the businesses and organizations present to give their own examples of how they were helping make green the mainstream, and it was encouraging to hear how so many businesses and organizations were making green efforts so many different ways.
After another networking break, Brady Dahmer and Lindsay Nahmiache, the founders of the Projecting Change Film Festival, went up on stage to tell the crowd a bit about this open source festival happening from April 22 to 25, 2010. In its third year, the festival shows engaging films on various environmental subjects and features local speakers and events as well. Brady emphasized the importance of connectivity to the audience, and the goal of the festival to bring people together and stimulate them to converse about environmental topics they care about. I am very much looking forward to checking out this event, and Lindsay assured us that the films chosen are generally uplifting and inspire change instead of depressive outlooks.
The last speaker was Cease Wyss, food activist, filmmaker and artist. She talked passionately about food security and how indigenous food sources are disappearing. Cease explained that when the colonization of North America occurred, not only were the indigenous people colonized, but the indigenous plants as well, when agriculture was introduced. With her work on ethnobotany, she works on projects reviving indigenous plants in green areas, and encourages First Nations people to come into community gardens. Cease ended her talk by urging us to be less greedy about how we live, which was a good take home message as we need to see the bigger picture if we are to live sustainably on this planet.
The event ended appropriately with the participants gathering outside on 4th Avenue to watch the Olympic Torch go by--Vancouver is ready to show the world how its environmentally responsible attitude is going to make a difference. From what I saw at Greenstream, I'm optimistic that our city is on the right track to meet its goal of being the Green Capital of the world by 2020.
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