How a fake Loch Ness Monster helped bring a dammed-up river back to life -- and how climate change is coming for your pumpkins. Read on!

🌊 Good news: In Grand Rapids, they're ripping out century-old dams to bring the rapids back to the Grand River - and this 15-year initiative was catalyzed by a Nessie art installation.

🎃 Not-so-good news: This year the pumpkins took a beating worldwide, with drought, heat and flood decimating crops from North America to the UK.

📣 What you can do: In Australia, there’s still time to join Climate for Change’s Challenge for Climate: ten climate actions over ten days, through October 24. And in Canada, enter Canadian Geographic’s Live Net Zero Household Challenge by writing in the climate actions you’re already taking at home!

Even if you're not in Australia or Canada, tell someone why climate change matters to you this week. Most of us already care, we just have to say so out loud - and by doing so, we're "unsilencing the majority"! 💚

talkingclimate.ca/p/whats-spoo…

This week I handed my newsletter to the one and only Queen of Peat, ecologist Merritt Turetsky. Her big idea? Stop treating wet land as a problem to drain. Start seeing it as something to work with instead!

🌿 Good news: A new approach called paludiculture flips the script: instead of draining peatlands to farm them, it keeps them wet and grows what actually thrives there: cattails for insulation, sago for food, and much more.

🔥 Not-so-good news: When a peatland is drained, it turns from a carbon vault to carbon source. A single drained bog the size of Manhattan can release as much CO₂ as burning a few hundred thousand pounds of coal a day.

🐸 What you can do: Become a bog champion: visit a local wetland and learn what lives there, ask your garden store to drop peat-based compost, and back the groups working to protect peatlands! For more, check out Merritt's new book, Bogland.

This week, plan a visit to a wetland near you. We can’t protect what we don’t know and appreciate, and action begins the moment we start to care 💚

talkingclimate.ca/p/whats-hidi…

At this year's NY Climate Week, the biggest positive change I saw wasn't the buzz about some new technology or policy. It was people finally realizing that talking about climate is where action starts. 👏 👏 👏

🗣️ Good news: For the first time ever there were more events on climate communication than I could attend, nearly 50 -- from a climate storytelling masterclass to Sesame Street's Elmo to our Talking Climate Collaborative launch. This tells me that communication is finally starting to be treated as the work itself, rather than an afterthought 😅

📢 Not-so-good news: What people believe is shaped less by the facts and a lot more by what whoever they trust tells them. This year, climate misinformation was coming from the US president at the UN podium ... which is exactly why who chooses to speak up matters so much.

🤝 What you can do: The most trusted messenger on climate isn't a scientist or an activist. It's someone people already know and trust. Which means, to the people you know, it's you!

So this week, share one thing you've learned with a community you're part of, and be brave enough to bring it up with someone who's never heard you say it.

Talking about climate isn't optional. It's where change begins 💚 talkingclimate.ca/p/conversati…

Many of us eat meals we had no hand in planning, whether at school, at work, or in the hospital. Often, we assume there's nothing we can do about them ... but one hospital just proved otherwise. Read on!

🍽️ Good news: At a Vancouver hospital, psychology & sustainability researchers teamed up with a chef, dietitians, and doctors to create new fish- and plant-rich dishes patients loved. Nutrition went up, food-related emissions went down, and more than 20 other hospitals are following suit!

🐟 Not-so-good news: As oceans warm, the algae at the base of the marine food web are making fewer of the omega-3s our eyes, brains, and hearts depend on. That shortfall travels all the way up to the fish on our plates.

🙋🏻‍♀️ What you can do: The kitchens at your school, workplace, or church serve more food in a week than you'll cook in a year. This makes them one of the highest-impact places to change what's on the plate.

This week, find out who plans the menu at a cafeteria where you eat, and ask if they'd add more healthy and plant-rich options. You don't need a plan, a budget, or a title, just the willingness to ask 💚
talkingclimate.ca/p/climate-ac…

If we want better climate conversations, we need to invest in the people having them.

I know firsthand how isolating this work can be — and how much more effective we could be with better access to one another, to evidence about what works, and to the support needed to keep going.

That’s why I’m so excited to finally introduce the Talking Climate Collaborative.

This week, my friend, fellow co-founder, and TCC Executive Director Bernadette Woods Placky is joining me to share why we built TCC and what our new Landscape Assessment taught us about the field.

📣 Good news: People already care, and climate communicators are working hard to break the silence. Nearly 8 in 10 communicators we surveyed talk about climate at least weekly.

🤐 Not-so-good news: A third surveyed work entirely alone, and only 41% have received funding for climate communication in the past five years. Many also want more help finding collaborators and learning what works.

🗣️ What you can do: Explore TCC’s new tools, resources, network, and Landscape Assessment — and find something that can help you start your next climate conversation.

Communication is climate action. The more we talk, the easier it becomes for others to join in.

talkingclimate.ca/p/communicat…

Earlier this summer, extreme heat was forcing major outdoor events to cancel — and the climate trolls had plenty to say about it.

“It’s just summer.”
“It’s been hotter before.”
“The climate has always changed.”
“Just tough it out.”

So in this episode of Cold Facts, Hot Takes, I’m taking on those arguments one by one.

Why are today’s heat waves becoming longer, stronger, and more dangerous? Why can’t natural factors explain the warming we’re seeing? What does extreme heat actually do to the human body? And no, the answer isn’t giving up air conditioning.

Because climate change isn’t really about “saving the planet.” It’s about saving us.

Enjoy the preview here: talkingclimate.ca/p/preview-tr…

Upgrade your subscription to watch the full episode: talkingclimate.ca/p/cfht-heatw…

Bad climate news finds us everywhere: our inboxes, our screens, and more ... but good news is often hiding in plain sight and sometimes it's right on the roof of your own old high school.

🏫 Good news: My dad just tipped me off that the Toronto District School Board now has 358 buildings with rooftop solar; that's nearly 150,000 panels quietly generating clean power over students' heads as they study.

🏔️ Not-so-good news: A catastrophic flash flood in the Himalayas has killed more than 1,000 people and left thousands more missing across Nepal and China. It's a disaster climate change made more likely and one that fell hardest on those who did the least to cause it.

🙏 If you'd like to help, please donate to Nepal's national Disaster Relief Fund: pmdrf.nchl.com.np/

🔦 What you can do: Go climate sleuthing where you live: look for the solar panels, electric buses, bike lanes, and heat pumps already showing up around you. Then, share what you see with others around you. The more visible these solutions get, the faster your neighbour asks, "why not here?" 💚

talkingclimate.ca/p/a-climate-…