A warm welcome to everyone, and on behalf of the Ottawa Baha'i Community welcome
to our 18th Big Ideas presentation and this one is entitled,
Making Good Things Happen: Environmental Action at the Grassroots
with Bill Kelly. It's great to see so many new and
familiar faces. The Big Ideas speaker series endeavours to
bring together the current research, experience, contemporary discourses
with a Baha'i perspective. We usually have two Friday evening presentations a
month on a wide variety of topics. We will begin with a piece of music by
Luke Slott a favourite quote about our attitude to the world
from the Baha'i Writings called "Blessed is the Spot."
And now, we're moving on to tonight's presentation.
Our speaker this evening is Bill Kelly, originally from the United States and we
are so happy he has ended up here in Ottawa, Canada.
Bill grew up in a military family and was a U.S Marine during the Vietnam era.
He then attended the University of Pennsylvania where he studied psychology,
and later, starting in the early 1980s worked to bring computer access and
literacy to low-income, disabled and racially
disadvantaged communities. Later he turned to entrepreneurship and
established multiple green businesses, including a solar energy company
and an e-commerce business that encouraged repair and reuse of
electronic devices. Bill lives with his wife and business
partner Sherry and son Aaron in suburban Ottawa.
In his presentation this evening Bill will draw on his experience in working,
"sometimes successful" he says, towards making good things happen.
He hopes to inspire others to be active contributors towards justice and the
progress of humanity. Bill has worked with the Ottawa Baha'i
Cluster Environmental Group of which he is a member to prepare this presentation
he hopes to show that even individuals and small groups
can work to encourage sustainable practices and participation
and participate in bringing about change necessary to begin the healing of
our planet. Bill over to you!
All right! Welcome and I want to thank our host Heather and Linda, who are
behind this whole Big Ideas thing and who are two people
who have shown us how to
"Make good things happen." and that's kind of what in my mind this
whole thing is about is how to make good things happen it
just happens that if you want to make good things
happen and you don't have any ideas of your own the "environment" it's probably
the best area to look at and certainly
the area where a lot of different types of injustices in the planet are
occurring and by mitigating them we can help mitigate
those types of injustices. So, you'll hear the phrase,
"Good things happen" a lot during this presentation.
We have well"¦ I also want to thank the member the
members of the Ottawa Cluster Environmental Group who
kind of inspired this whole thing and have been assisting in some of the
content for the slideshows you're about to see.
and we want to of course thank everybody for joining us tonight.
The presentation, to give you a bit of a road map has nine parts.
The first part is going to be an anecdote describing the snowball effect
of making a good thing happen. The second part is
going to be, with regard to, "Creating value" and how that's important to
social entrepreneurship and making good things happen.
We want to show some tools as to how to be effective in being in the
right place at the right time and taking advantage of the windows of opportunity
that are there. That section we call them, "Finding the Future."
We want to be able to show you a process
by which good things can be "made" to happen.
We want to show how "Moderation" , in section five, how moderation will be
Important for our efforts to pay off.
We want to address active "Engagement in our world," as well as, we have members
of the some of the Rotary Clubs in the area
that are watching in on this presentation.
With regard to how they can be ways to leverage
Our efforts. What we're doing now is the next
section then. We're going to be talking specifically
about the Ottawa Cluster Environment Group and the
ninth section, is the last section and it's"
I'm not going to tell you what that's about, because you'll have to hang around to
find out. So with that,
I will go ahead and begin the the slideshow presentation.
So, the first thing is a quote from the Universal House of Justice, which is the
the governing body of the Baha'i Faith.
"One of the most pressing problems of humanity in the current century
is how a growing, rapidly developing, and not yet global population can
now yet united global population can, in a just manner,
live in harmony with the planet and its finite resources."
So that's kind of the problem that we have at hand.
With that we'll go here and right here you'll see some
solar panels and I'll tell you a little story about that real quick.
My oldest son Aaron was a
I think a sophomore in high school and he wanted to
to have solar panels on his roof, because it seemed like the right thing to do.
This is about circa 2008 - 2009.
and so, we figured it out, we got our credit card and
called it his birthday present and him and I were up on the roof
a lot, a lot of trips to the hardware store and we
we installed this solar array. The process we had to get a building
permit we went down to the building permit place
in Dallas and they told us that they had never had
anyone applying for a building permit for solar panels in Dallas.
I don't know if that was because this never happened in Dallas before or
If those guys just hadn't seen it in their careers there.
So we were we handed our permit.
They said we needed this thing called an "elevation" ,
we didn't know what that was, we thought that we needed to use a ladder to get up
on the roof but it turns out it turns out it
they needed a picture of the house, a drawing of the house and so we sat there
and drew like a cartoon picture of the house and they gave us our permit,
and off we went to do the solar install.
So once we have done that and this is what
we're going to call a small thing, a small "good thing" , that we made happen.
and we're going to show anecdotally
where this goes where how this can snowball into
some pretty "big things" and so the next slide is going to be about
a job we've done with a friend of ours, his name is Bill Matthews
from Dallas he's a prominent Methodist Minister
in the area and we are good friends and he saw that
we had done this and he's like "wow that's a pretty good idea" and we
talked and we recognized that him being a prominent
person that if we wanted to proselytize the idea of
"green energy" that his, his status in the community and his
influence would be very useful. So we made a deal with him. We said we would
put this on your roof, we would put solar on your roof,
at cost and he would have the benefit of that,
and we would be able to use it to demonstrate to people in
the community that solar was a good idea.
So, we did exactly that and here we can see how almost instantly we had what I would
call community activism. We have our family here, there's William, here's Aaron.
William is my youngest son, Aaron's our oldest
son, and we had some
Baha'is and we had some people from the parents and
young people from Aaron's school all showed up to help with this project.
So when we offered to do it at cost,
we kept the cost pretty low. And here essentially,
you'll see this guy here in the red shirt he is
our master electrician he'll come up later in this anecdote.
So, from there, you know we just kind of worked this job.
It might be good to know that it was about 100 degrees when all this was happening.
And we finished it I think within a day or two.
And here's the picture of Bill Matthews, and the reverend Bill
Matthews and his wife Norma, and Bill decided after
we had done this, that we would have a
like a party at his house with people interested in his neighborhood that
expressed an interest in what's going on with the solar panels on this house.
So that's what we did and we gave our, well, I guess this was my first
social presentation around social activism which was
getting solar going. From there, Aaron went to college
and when he went to college, he picked the college that was interested
in being involved in a government program,
the contest for creating zero energy houses
in competition with other colleges and
this is Middlebury College in Vermont and
as you can see from the background the Washington Monument.
His next solar job essentially wound up in Washington DC in this contest.
And I think they got fourth place and they were the only liberal arts college
that even endeavoured to do this kind of thing.
So, I want to drive back a little bit and say remember
that this came from we started off with just
doing a roof job with the hardware store,
in a house in Dallas. Now here's some other
installations that we did while he was going to school
in Middlebury and later on Vermont Law School,
this is a Lucas Texas installation, that we've done in Parker Texas and this
coming back to Benson Vermont is going to be our example of how
our demonstration of how solar can be done we had no,
going into this, we had no formal training or experience in contracting or
Construction. We just bought this piece of land
and we said okay we're going to do solar here we had a we had a
tentative contract with Green Mountain College
to build 150 kilowatt solar installation,
that's about 570 solar panels. So we're going to run through quickly
the process of doing that and I'll just talk it through a little bit
this is the survey, you can see the pink tails at the bottom right-hand corner,
those are to mark where the posts go.
These are the the guys laying out
pipe and our conduit and all these guys that we hired here are locals,
and they also had never been involved in
solar they were just applying their skills to the
to the task at hand. So, we're burying so conduit. We are getting,
here comes the solar panels, and that's an exciting time.
And now, we're getting ready to lay out the posts so that they could be
pounded into the ground. I wanted to stop on this slide,
and point out to the background. You see, a mobile home, and I want to point out
that because we lived in that home during this project in Vermont
in the winter, it was kind of a nightmare, because there was like,
very, there was zero energy efficiency you know we were burning
kerosene and that was a big problem.
What I wanted to point out is that that mobile homes are very
energy inefficient it's very costly to get through a winter in the North
with living in a mobile home and that's kind of a good example of how
you can, you can have a very energy inefficient home
and a huge, a huge carbon footprint and pay
more for it than a person who might have a little more capital
in a more energy efficient home would pay
someone who has more money would pay less
for the same degree of warmth and comfort and
what we're saying here is that this is an example of how the poor
can get poorer and the planet dirtier at the same time and
I would encourage anyone who has the ear of a
a governed, governing person to that this would be a way to do
some a little bit of solar activism by
Encouraging mobile home producers to create mobile
homes that don't drain the pockets of the poor and
increase our carbon issues. So, let's move on with our process for installing.
This is the thing that pounds the posts in the ground
it's called a gyke and it just pounds all these posts to the ground a long ways deep.
That's me on a tractor, on the job,there,
I'm not in charge of this job, Aaron, was in charge of this job.
I was just a utility man. And you notice there's nobody around,
that's because when I got on a tractor people disappeared.
And that was pretty much my function there was to make
to bring people and stuff and maybe fix problems that might come up.
Here's a solar race coming into place. This is William who came down from
college in Minnesota on his break and he could have gone to
Florida or Padre Islands but he wanted to be a part of this.
He wanted, he knew we were doing a good thing,
and he wanted to be a part of it. So, there he is in the middle of, about nine
o'clock at night, about 15, 12, 15 below
zero centigrade. You know doing, doing his bit, and you know this is kind of
I wanted to point out to you,
to the how family unity can really be important,
and having an idea and your family being with you 100 percent,
and carrying it through and Aaron had this idea and we all got behind him
and we made this happen. This is a very difficult job because we
had no experience doing this at all. Here is first row of solar panels going on.
That's a completed row. This is where
we're about ready to be done putting the wiring in and such.
This is where the power company comes out and connects everything
to the grid. And this is what everybody looks for and celebrates,
is that little left hand arrow that you see right here.
Now that means that power at the meter is running backwards,
and that it's going, and power is going on the grid.
And that everything works and it's functional and you're,
we actually start generating income at this point start to recover our investment.
So, the Benson project is, it was, our first large-scale installation.
Our knowledge was informed by internet
research, classes and solar classes given within the solar
Industry. And by our experience our next project
was substantially larger and this is about
2200 solar panels for Vermont Law School.
There's about a half a megawatt of energy was produced from this and
I want to point out again, down here that we started off with with
this and this just kind of rolled into that, just by
taking advantage of the opportunities in front of us and having the desire to
"make good things happen."
We have here, the ribbon cutting for this this array with
the dean of Vermont Law School. There's Aaron there and
some professors and school and students
and such, and everybody in the neighborhood was pretty excited about this.
So that, that is our
kind of the conclusion of our thing going from small
to, to large and just by doing what you want to do, that is also a good thing.
Okay, we want to discuss creating value
because it's an important aspect to
doing so doing good to making good things happen
it's important aspect to social entrepreneurship.
It's also important aspect to business, to doing business.
So I'm going to show three examples of creating value in this case.
I think Heather mentioned we have a business where we show people
how to change the batteries in devices so that they don't have to replace
their device. They can keep using what they have
and spend quite a bit less money and not be
essentially wasteful consumers.
And the value that we created here is essentially showing them how and we put
the tools which are sold like commodities and the
battery which also sold like commodities together with a video to create a kit.
Which in turn created value, which generated income.
So that in this case value equates to income.
We'll be showing you that it's not always the case. We have about
1500 videos now for different devices.
The kids were doing this, these videos when they were in school, high school.
They actually worked their way through College, before they got there.
With the videos that they were involved in producing, for each one
of these, sales that we make from this. 200 people
watch our videos that means 199 people and a good part of that the rest of
those people say okay this is a great video. Thank you,
for the information. Now I'm going to see if I can find the battery cheaper,
and not really buy into the value added.
So, even though only one person feels like well I want to do a business
with the company that knows, what knows, knows how to do this and will back me up
And show appreciation for the information
That, they give me the ability to be able to do this, even it's only one out of 200
that, was all we needed. And that means that all these other people
are doing this good thing and we're not definitely directly benefiting from it,
but that has great value and in terms of pulling back from
materialism and the wastefulness and the the detrimental impact that that has
on the planet. So while something can be
of value in generating income, it can also be
of even more value in the positive effect it has a
in our society and that's why we are
proud of this business. And this is how this is an example of
thinking about creating value when you want to
make something good happen.
Here we have something that has very little to do with our family except
once again Aaron was involved while he was going to law school.
This is a volunteer organization that
looked at the circstances around there and said we'd like to get
more people doing solar, how can we do that?
They went and made a deal with the solar installers
to get economies of scale, in other words a lower price
for any people that they brought to them
and they offered this thing they gave this offer
for this economies of scale to the people in the community
and they actually went door-to-door knocking on things showing them the
benefit knocking on people's doors showing the benefits of
having solar from a financial as well as from a
environmental point of view and they signed up a whole bunch of people so
they created value essentially by bringing together
the buyer and the seller toward the problem of
of reducing carbon there. And this is an interesting
thing here, because, I'm coming from a business man's perspective, he's going to
law school and he's also wandering around knocking on people's
doors selling them solar and I'm like, your time is worth something.
The people who do the solar, you know,
are benefiting from this, the people are benefiting from this but
you're getting nothing out of it, and you're doing
law school. Maybe you should think about, you know, doing something else,
because where's the value there? His sense of it was that,
the value, is that he's being an instrumental part of
reducing the carbon footprint of the community and that it wouldn't
happen if people didn't volunteer their time.
because twenty percent of the solar installers costs are
attributed to the cost of selling the job. So they took that on,
that responsibility and the people who do the
solar shared the difference with the people who
buy the solar and they were able to create this
enough value to make a lot of people get involved in doing this
this operation, I think along with similar operations from the
same companies, these same non-profit I think
we're responsible in the area for hundreds of
solar installations! So, this this hopefully is a very good
idea of what we mean by bringing value to
making good things happen. Now here's another example, this is
related Rotary Club. You remember I pointed out to you the
master electrician on the roof, well he was a Rotary Club member and he
invited me to Rotary and so I joined Rotary.
And there we were, and they were like looking at me saying, okay what are you
gonna do? and I'm like, I don't know. I said well we'll put you on the ethics
Committee. And so, I got on ethics committee and
they looked at me said, what are we going to do?
And I said okay let's think about this. We have, we're concerned about ethics.
We have a situation where people's kids are bullying each other and there's no
spiritual development or guidance in the schools.
How can we fill in that gap?
And we had just gotten done with this
science fair participation, that one of the,
I think it was William or Aaron was involved in,
and so, I would say like let's have an "Ethics Fair"
And let's encourage people to, you know, come up with some creative
expression of their understanding of ethics and give,
give them a reward.
First you have judging and then give them
a prize just like a science fair. And Rotary,
I mean having the idea was, you know like you could have ideas every day,
and Rotary, they took that idea and gave
all the resources that we needed to make it happen. They had the connections with
the very active school teachers and principals
at a local schools and everything worked out. So that, they set up the first annual
"Ethics Fair" and the one thing I want to point out to
this is that this was still going on. This happened in 2011.
This was still going on right up to the time of the pandemic and I think it
probably didn't happen during the pandemic, but,
the point being, is that you can, you can make good things happen and
you don't have to be there to manage it and if you can
detach yourself from what you've created, it will go on
without you and that's like a real important thing
to know, because that means that you don't have to get bogged down
in something that doesn't really need you. That is
self-sustainable and it's also good to try to work towards the
self-sustainability of our good ideas. That you're able to be
involved in, in this case Rotary said this is of value.
This has value to our community, this has
Value to the Rotary club and we're going to
keep doing it! And Bill, if you want to participate fine,
if not that's fine too! And, that, you know to me, that's
that's a beautiful thing! So, these were the three examples of
value in both social entrepreneurship and in business.
So before we go to the next module,
we're going to point out that in none of these endeavours
were there any expertise, we just went out and did things, including the
members of Rotary they didn't really have expertise in this
they just had the heart and the connections and the
understanding of what their capacities were.
And they did these things! So, whether it was installing solar
or creating an Ethics Fair, if you look at the fact that you
have no experience or no knowledge about something but you would like to see
something happen, then that knowledge is easy to get,
or at least it's gettable and it's gotten easier and easier to get,
as knowledge has been more and more widely distributed on things like
YouTube and the internet as a whole.
That it's important to remember that.
What you don't know doesn't have to hurt you.
Our next section is about "Finding the Future"
this is what I consider a very important aid
in making good things happen it has to do with
concepts that you already have in mind like windows of opportunity and
and being in the right place at the right time
if you look if those of you who watch the are looking on the internet
for these graphics on the news about for example
what's the most likely outcome of a political election
what's the most how many it was how many immunization shots are
likely to be given in your area given by May
you see these charts that show very likely on you know
all the way out to probably won't happen and this is
this is a this is essentially a quasi-statistical way of figuring out of
predicting the future is what it comes down to
around the thing you know a small part of the continuum that is we what we
call reality so for for example like if you
want to to be a a solar developer
and you've learned that there's a like of great likelihood that at a
certain point in time there's gonna be an increase
in an interest in renewable energy then guess what you can
create the option to do that create the option
to be ready to take advantage of that situation
to further your your goals so so what that comes down to is that you
learn everything you can about what's going on around you
and you based on what you learned you
determine what the likely future might be
and you know you don't really want to invest in that
in terms of like okay I think bitcoin is going to really take off and I'm going
to buy me a bunch I you know I think that that's not
the point the point is to create options for yourself so that
when if and when a reality does arrive you're able to to make good things happen
by being there with a clear mind and you
have that clear mind because you've got there if you've predicted
that this is going to happen basically with information and
intuition and experience and you've got there
and so you when you know where you're at when you have a clear mind you are
what that means the the benefit to having a clear mind is
that you know what to do and you know what not to do
and when you're in the business of making good things happen whether
they're financial or altruistic
that is a very valuable thing to to get you going and you know
how much time you have to do it like when the opportunity can close
on these and if you've done done it and moved on to the next
very likely circstance then that's that's the way it goes
and I think that that for the Baha'i Faith as well as other
all faiths and services service organizations
we are now in a very likely
space where we can be instrumental in improving the outlook
and the quality of life for humanity by becoming
actively involved in solving a particular problem
which we call in in a climate change or environment
so that's and it is a window of opportunity because if
we don't do it then we're going to be all we're all going to
become firemen it would be looking and we'll be all putting out fires if we
have if we're if we're our if we're
altruistic people we'll be totally bogged down
with that if we do do it then
then we will have shown who we are as individuals in our society and
essentially be in essentially being involved in putting out the fire before
it burns everything down and that in turn gives us more
ability to become engaged in other issues and
other problems that remain around social disparities
so, let me move on to there so we're going to go from there
the to just a basic process for making good
things happen and this is really common sense
we want to identify the need and you know if you don't know anything
you just wake up one morning and you say you know I really feel like making
something good happen well you know what are the needs you
know you go you go down to the store to get a cup of
coffee or something and you walk by a homeless person there's a need
you know come back out of the
store with your cup of coffee and and a car guns its engines and clouds
you with carbon monoxide and makes you
it makes a lot of noise and they're like well there's a need
so that you can find identifying the need is not a
problem it's like we should probably should say selecting the need
because there's too many to choose from and you have to kind of hone in on
what best is parallel with your passion as well as what is best needed as
well as one of you what are your capacities to deal with
that and so and that's the process identify
the need assess available resources and
considerations when we say considerations we mean things that might
keep you from doing it or
injustices that you might cause in pursuing
working that need if if you don't think it through
so and that would be the last section is once you've thought it through
is you apply the resources that you need sustainably, strategically
and with moderation I'm going to give two quick examples
by revisiting that these same things that we've talked about
in the context of
looking at how what is the process but here the process the is that they
identify the need reduce the community's carbon emission
the resources volunteers and local solar installers
solution as well volunteers negotiate with
installers come up with a discount for people
and the spread homeowners to install solar done they
make things happen good things happen just all identifying the need
having putting the resources together and applying it towards a solution
again I'm revisiting Rotary so how does the Rotary look here well
the need maybe let's say is reduced bullying and disrespectful behavior in
school everybody who has kids that they send
off to school you know and their their heart drops a little bit because
they know that that's that's not the best environment
at all times for their children to be but they have to go to work
so that's a big a big need so the resources in this case
was volunteers area network of contacts
news personalities community leaders to serve as judges
all of these essentially were supplied by Rotary because
these guys are connected and they're very effective
in identifying problems and going after them
with gusto and of course the teachers in the school administration
you know the teachers didn't care way beyond more than they get paid
and it's the same with the school administration
these things when it wouldn't happen so you could call the teachers and schools
some of the best volunteers and of course the participating students if
this if the students don't have it in their
hearts to want to work
bring out the best part of their natures and and show people what that looks like
then that's not going to happen and so that was you know you know the the
those are the resources the solution was to conduct the competition around
artistic expression and appreciation for ethical behavior
and again this this is a self-sustaining
result that is self-sustaining because
there are organizations like Rotary that can take something
help get it going and then help sustain it for as long as it has value
and you can move on to the next thing
so here we're talking about "Moderation" this came up with when we were
looking at them we were studying our Universal House of
Justice letter about not being radical in our pursuit of
agendas such as making
you know planet cleaner and such as that and
you know to me I was like you know we want to get this done we got to push
things to limit so so I have to stop and think about this
and a quote from the Baha'i writings is
"Whatsoever passes beyond the limits of moderation will cease to
exert a beneficial influence." and I kind of made my own based on that
made my own definition of moderation in this context and that is
making good things happen without being the cause of disunity or
injustice, so that's
what we want to look at in terms of if we want to make good things and things
happen we have we talked about some things to
do well moderation really kind of talks about some
some things to do and some things not to do
so this slide here is pretty just like two totally different
people it looks like but really these guys are each other's
friends they don't know each other they're coming from different parts of
the world this man is proud to be
someone who is contributing to the the basic comforts and
and realities of our society that having a steady supply of energy
provided that everybody has gotten used to
and taken for granted and this lady over here she's like we got to
decarbonize this place and that's because it's going to
burn our planet down and our kids our kids and grandkids are
going to have you know difficult lives as a result so
they're good friends because she's concerned about
the future of his and her grandchildren and children
and she's also when she puts that just transition
above her demand for decarbonization she's also concerned
that this person who is on the oil rig or is oil
drilling whatever that
is not harmed by this decarbonization that he gets to retain
the dignity the place in society that he deserves as a man working
hard in a dangerous job to raise a family that's really
what it comes down to there's no reason that
that he should be a a victim as we rushed
rush toward removing car carbon-based fuels from our
economy and so this is what we mean
I think in in the larger sense by moderation
is that we stop being radical when we say
we don't just say decarbonize but when we say
you know or else but when we say decarbonize but don't hurt anybody in
the process and make sure that the human dignity
that we want which is the reason for our grandchildren which is the
reason that that we want to decarbonize is afforded to the people who have
get who who are out there now doing what they've been given to do in
their implied social contract of being productive on behalf society of
society and maybe society will take care of you
that's I think a very important principle is
this moderation and you can look in if you want to find out about more about
"Just Transition" if you're all about fix the economy
fix the environment and hadn't thought about
these things or didn't know what to do about these things
there's a lot of a lot of guidance with regard to that
and essentially what we're talking about is persuading your government
to do things that that to not essentially
approve any policies that also don't take into account
the the social justice that should go along with it
and that's I think significant in
what kind of success we have in terms of pursuing our goals for
environmental improvements on the planet.
So, here we have people and we want to we want to go in and do solar panels
because we think solar is a really good thing
but the farmers are like well what about us you know we need to we
need our land and you're coming in you're buying our land and you're you're
you're doing this and we talk to these people and
town hall meetings these they they can express themselves in very in a
very animated and passionate way so we looked at that we said well look
how much would it cost us to raise these solar panels up higher
so that we can run livestock and it turns out it was
like five percent! and so, we made a proposal to them from
the Law School that we would do and the point here is
that we made the array compatible
with agriculture use you didn't you can't do
everything you want to do on there agriculturally but certainly it's
retained a substantial amount of this agricultural value
simply by changing the design of the array to accommodate
livestock feeding and that satisfied a lot of people that
people and other developers started doing that shortly thereafter
so it was a good thing and there was also a reward for this moderation
and that is we got free lawn mowing for example I would put this in the
category of moderation is the that for people who helped us work on
this we created a sign and we showed that
they were our partners in this and this was really important to the
local people all these people had families in the
area and you know their names are you know a lot of people with these
same last names in the area you know these are rural areas
with close-knit communities and people were very proud of this and they
had a sense of buy-in rather than just somebody coming in from Texas
and slapping down some solar panels to fill their coffers so the simple things
like this can can make what is radical to others and
if you define a radical as being a lot of change that is threatening
being proposed then we mitigated that and
we were able to move forward with what we couldn't consider to be making good
things happen so I wanted to talk about active
engagement in our world something that that what it comes
down to I use the word a lot leverage there's only so much that we
can do as an individual certainly I find every day and lament
every day all the limitations that that I have
in terms of making something happen but when you have these
these service organizations they have whole collections of people
all with different capacities and all with big hearts
if they don't have that they wouldn't be there
and they've been around for a while and they're stable and
they're very effective to making good things happen and
and not at very low cost you know new people who are looking for
efficient ways to to give money these guys
don't waste a whole lot on on their executive
executives or anything like that because everything's pretty much volunteer
the examples would be like United Nations Association
my friend Bill Matthews that was the prominent preacher in
in Texas he was or he is he's he established that in Texas and
moved that forward I don't know much about the Lions Club
I think the Rotary Reality project is something that Al Gore
created the Electric Vehicle Council something that Aaron and I are members
of here in Ottawa and we were also in other locations that we lived
they essentially promote the use of electric vehicles and then of
course the Ecology Ottawa probably which everybody in Ottawa has
has heard of but I think there's something there's a
similar kind of organization to that in most localities in North America the
and you could of course again see that Rotary is there and
I don't mean to give all the attention to Rotary and ignore these others but
this is the one that we have the most experience with and the most or that
we have experience with and that we have a very positive
experience with and so we're talking about here becoming
engaged in our world is something that we have to do if we want to go beyond
flower boxes and vegetable gardens in their backyard and clotheslines it's
all this there's a huge value to that that commercial or consumer
activism doing the right thing but there's no reason that we can't
leverage who we are in our capacities to
more you know to make good things more good things happen
so there's when you look at becoming engaged you want to look at the core
values of an organization like Baha'is have
some pretty strong
ethical grounding and you know spiritual standards and such as that and
so you don't want to you know and you you don't you want to be hesitant to
just into and become part of every organization that
pops up that kind of thing you want to make sure
that they have good moral standards that are not in
conflict with your own so if you look at the Rotary International
they have their core values is
very simple and profound four-way tests
of The things we think say or do is it the truth?
Is it fair to all concerned? Will it build good friendships? and
Will it build goodwill and better Friendships? and Will it be beneficial
all concerned? as far as I know that's well within the
scope of Baha'i understanding
of around within which to make good things happen
now I think I've already mentioned you know that how we can
leverage individual effort effective
the thing to remember about Rotary and similar organizations is that
they're effective servers for right and they're they're local they're doing
something very local there's a South Ottawa Rotary Club there's a downtown
Ottawa Rotary Club they're all over the place but
they're also International which means you can get involved in international
projects as well so you can be very influential in your
local area as well as your international area this
is something I can't do sitting at home surfing the web
you know during the pandemic or you know or even just planting trees
with a group of people I can only plant so many trees and besides that's
really hard work the
so the the the the one of the big benefits
another big benefit of this kind of operation is that
it's like when I came to Ottawa I was welcomed by the Baha'is like I was
really you know we were very delighted that
with the welcome that we got and amazed by the the
capacity the accomplishments and the kindness of people here
and we felt well connected because we were Baha'is we already were able to
come in and get to work the same was true about
Rotary we came to you know we come to Rotary
this all these things are true and so we were better connected than most people
who live here because we were "A" Baha'is
and "B" Rotary members you know we were immediately plugged in and
no excuse to not you know hit the ground running and start making things
making good things happen and that's what we've tried to do as a family
so I don't want to oversell a Rotary because it's the what I am trying
to do though is is get Baha'is and and other people
you know people from other faiths to recognize that
that to really be influential in your community you have to kind of go out
into the community and work with the best organizations whose
function is to make good things happen in a massive way one more slide on
that I think that I wanted to point out that
Rotary has these areas of focus and I think this is going to be true
from for many of the others I just don't know about them to share with you
but promoting peace, fighting disease, promoting clean water,
saving mothers and children, supporting education
growing local economies and just recently
like we're talking a month ago or so they added protecting the environment
to what they're doing as being a focus
so what that means is that there's a whole bunch of Rotary clubs out there
that are looking for a chair looking to establish
their committees and looking for people interested and
can put them together with the network that they have to make things happen
both locally and internationally and essentially
multiply or you know exponentially what you as an individual are able to do
by your participation in these service opportunities
that are made available to us by organizations such as Rotary
so that that's something I hope you all think about is
and if there's any if you're if you're interested in
finding or or becoming a part of a service organization
you can let the Baha'i Environmental Group know and or the
I'm sorry Ottawa Cluster Environmental Group you know
and we can work you know point you in the right direction and
introduce you to the right people and such as that
Okay so now let's get down to the to what we're doing now because we've
talked a lot of high falutin ideas and maybe a little bit of
you know showing what's been what we've what we've done
in the past and and but you know and it's not just us what's everybody
else doing and how our Baha'is and
and the in the community engaged in this these issues at this time
so here we say every choice of Baha'i makes as employer
employee or employer producer or consumer
borrower or leader benefactor or beneficiary
leaves a trace so this is why it is very important to
be good consumers and this is a
the the as consumer activism is setting an example so unless we're
doing the unless we're walking the walk
nobody's gonna listen to the talk and so we need to know what the
walk is and just like learning a good dance we
need to learn the good walk, so
so here we have some examples of things that are going on that we might they
might seem benign but they're very significant in our prospects for
including improving our situation on this planet
these folks here are building a grow box
for their backyard and growing their own food that's a good thing
they're also they're able to use
community supported organizations that they're essentially people who have
farms just outside of town that grow food and sell subscriptions
to that food to people in town and it's a very good way to get local food
let's support your local agricultural people and at the same time
since we're focusing around vegetables
it's a good way to enrich your plant diet with vegetables
as I think everybody probably knows vegetable
consption results in much less carbon emissions and also has
been shown to be a healthier way to go through life so
apart from the CSA's we should know like here
I think we have John there doing a community garden and what these
community gardens are is that the city will
be able to provide space in a park or you know green space that's available
for people to come and do a garden and
they have little boxes and they go and they do them
but also a portion of what they produce is given to the people in the community
that are in need so it's a very wholesome
way to get the food that you need with minimal negative impact on your
planet as well as address some of the other
social issues around food
availability in your area
and here we are showing indoor gardening
is an option where you can have soil based
and hydroponics this is actually our hydroponic system in our basement
we we grow all the vegetables we need I think this runs about 150 watts these
led grow lights and we're able to feed our
family of three with just these two and a half shelves
so we can essentially do a family of five and you have vegetables all winter
long for your salads without having to
to bring it in from California or that kind of thing also over here we
have this we're kind of experimenting with soil based
growth with some of the more fruity plants like vegetable
tomatoes and peppers and that's coming along very well
so that's a another aspect of of what we can do that
mitigates our our our carbon footprint while at the
same time it's good for you growing your own food
and eating it and that kind of thing so
the next thing we're looking at here in terms of what people are doing
I find this family interesting they are they
they go to as I understand it they go to Iceland because that's where their
relatives are are they visit them periodically and
when they go they plant trees so when they get on
the plane and create that big old carbon footprint from riding on a plane they go
there and they put that carbon footprint back into the ground I
think that's pretty nice a pretty a nice way to travel if you're
going to travel and take some trees with you not at
least some seeds so that's so yeah
now this is actually our house in Greeley Ottawa
Greeley Ontario and we just got some solar installed there
and already we've had a bunch of neighbors
I'm looking at the wrong slide let me back up here
okay let's first let's look at the transport sorry we'll look at the
transport choices and there we see
Commune Auto which is sharing the car we see electric car being charged and
bicycle rider and electric train there
so these are all good things that are happening now that we can participate in
we have to make choices how we want to commute how we want to get around
depending on where we live and what our situation is but
but we can walk or take a bicycle we can take public transit and ride
share car share and we can
buy a hybrid car plug-in electric car or an all-electric vehicle
those choices you know are based around you know what our needs are
The Ottawa Environmental Group is has a pretty detailed
breakout of what are the options and why you would buy
say a plug-in hybrid versus an all-electric car
versus a hybrid and there's also the option
of just getting a smaller internal combustion and
vehicle if you know you have to do what you can do not what you necessarily
like to do if you can't afford it or your lifestyle doesn't support it
but at least if you realize that transport is a choice and you want to
make the best one that you can so that you can minimize
your carbon footprint as an individual as a consumer
that's a good thing you can find out more about electric cars on
plugindrive.ca these links can be made available after
the show here and I didn't want to relay electric cars
to the solar if you do have if you have solar and
you have an electric car guess what you have free gas because
because the value of your solar is included in
the value of your house whatever you pay for your solar pretty
much comes back to you in the value of your house
so you've got free gas for the life of your
you know for your for life essentially solar panels last 30 years
and electric cars you know last 20 because they don't have a lot of
parts that break down we have a report on that as well
so going to so over to solar now this is actually
our house it has we just had this installed
we have a we make a big effort to make our solar installations pretty because a
non-pretty solar installation can have a negative impact on your
your real estate values but if you make
it pretty you get what we get and that is more
solar panels popping up all around you everywhere we've been that we put solar
panels in more solar panels pop up it
doesn't matter how conservative or or because they're a practical a
practical thing that your political leanings don't really
matter when it comes down to owning your energy versus leasing it and
being susceptible to the the whims of the people who are
releasing it to you so that's
the the important thing about this is that
is it you do it it affects what other people do
so and this is an example and so are so is everything
that we've talked about in in the consumer
choices mode all these things set the example
and when you set the example people notice that they start doing you know
and it's a good thing they start doing it that's what I would
call passive activism you're doing you're making good personal choices for
yourself you're not you know necessarily engaging and trying
to solve all the world's problems you just like I got to do what's what's
right for me and then and I hope everything else works out to
some degree that's really what most people can do is
they have a job to go to a family to feed
it's all you can expect so but by doing that that's not a small thing
because it affects other people and what they do
here we have someone I wanted to bring out is Carol
she's a a member of our committee that we're really proud to have with us
and she's she's kind of a leader we before this group was set up or
anything like that she's been out there in the community leading these efforts
for recapturing carbon as opposed to
minimizing the carbon that you use so her focus has been
recaptured the carpet that's out there and she promotes
rooftop gardens she's involved with kelp farm projects
out of the area and she promotes the Carbon Capture Day event
that essentially seeks to educate and empower
others with regard to what we call carbon sink that is
bringing taking carbon out of the the environment which is kind of a
another angle on carbon reduction essentially
so this here is a yet another thing that that we're doing
and we want to encourage others to do you can see
the quote down there this is from greta everybody knows her
"You must take action. You must do the impossible. Because giving up
never can be an option." This is a picture of
an event that happened in 2019 I believe it was the
Ottawa Climate Strike where the kids
pretty much made this happen around Greta's
movement Greta Thunberg movement so
you can see there's a whole lot of people out there and it's peaceful and
they all know that they're working to make good things happen
and here we have Heather and Jim Desson
who has left us we're having a conversation here at this
at this party and I mean at this protest and we're
actively engaged in it and I wanted to point him out because he was a good
friend he he continues to make good things happen
as a result of his writings his service work and his helpful encouragement
to me and yeah so just because
you leave it behind doesn't mean that
you impact doesn't is stops you know Jim stopped being with us but
he'll be with me for the rest of my life so there's that
there's we get ROBSI so ROBSI is is a a way of saying
Rideau Ottawa Baha'i Schools Initiative so that's all very good it's a good way
to educate children in the Faith but I think
even as important if not even more important
is that it's a good way to for young people
to become aware and learn to love and appreciate nature
and that this is what happens when you go to a camp like this whether it's a
Baha'i camp or Methodist camp or it doesn't matter
the kids don't care about those things they care that they're having a good
time and that they somehow feel better because they're in nature they
may not know why or or care but it's a really good thing and if you're a
volunteer that helps make these things happen then
you're an an environmental activist because
these children growing up with a respect and love for
nature are going to be much more influential on
making the planet a better place than if they didn't have that
opportunity so if you have the opportunity to in your
faith group to become involved in getting those
kids out out of town into
into what we used to call reality what we now call nature
it would be one of the better things that you know
that you can do as we say a passive activist
so the Ottawa Cluster Environment Group getting towards the end here in case
anybody's wondering the Ottawa Cluster
Environment Group is is established to to empower members of
the community to transform their lives with the sustainability of a planet
the community has the capacity to mandate
and to contribute meaningful meaningfulness to a better amount of
planet and as such we encourage and promote
good environmental practices that individuals can take to reduce
negative environmental impacts our objectives are to help people in the
community to become informed about environmental challenges before us
to gain understanding of the actions that could be undertaken to help meet
those challenges and to come encourage and facilitate
action this is some of our work product where
we produce articles and I guess you could call
white papers on various areas of opportunity for people
to make choice to help people make informed choices
that make them better stewards of the environment and their consumer behaviour
and finally in conclusion this is the part that you're supposed to wait around for
you the what we're what we're saying here is do what you
can do to transition into an environmentally positive lifestyle
recognize and implement opportunities to create value
leadership and unity towards an environmentally sustainable society
get behind young people as they begin to lead humanity
towards its sustainable destiny and remember that every little good thing
that you make happen has the potential to grow beyond what
you've imagined possible. Thank you.
Thank you, that was one of the, it was it took us a whole lot of
ideas and put it into a really good structure
so that one thing led to another and everything made sense and everything
hung on the other I personally always like when there's also
diverse ideas get together into one and you made one of a lot of different
ideas so thank you very very much for that.
And to take it from the idea of just too little
visually to go from two small little solar power
panels to to the huge amount of panels with the sheep
beside them was just it's just lovely I really enjoyed that
and that there's things and that there's all sorts of
good groups out there doing things and we should not be it's so easy for
people in this world to become discouraged
and also to look for good guys and bad guys but to work together and
until there's a sense of unity and and seeing
each other's point of view and then hoping to work
together to bring everything forward it's it's
very, it is a very empowering talk.
Thank you very much!