January 2017 | Business View Magazine

112 113 Green Communities Canada or a rain garden. We liberate the soil, as we like to say. Our big picture objective is to transform the way that rain is managed on the landscape in order to absorb rainfall into the soil, into veg- etation, and into the atmosphere. It’s all about restoring the urban water cycle which is inter- rupted when you pave everything over. What you want to do is make a city more ‘sponge-like’ through a variety of measures like rain gardens, green roofs, bio-swales, infiltration trenches, and so on. Depave Paradise is a way of engag- ing people – it’s fun, it’s interesting, it’s exciting, it gets people involved and ready to move on in understanding the bigger picture goals and how they can be achieved.” Another element in Green Communities’ port- folio concerns walkable communities. “We’ve been working on improving community walk- ability for two decades and things have really heated up,” Maynes says. “Walking was no- where when we started and now it’s recognized as a positive for all sorts of reasons, including economic reasons. Real estate in walkable neighborhoods has now become quite attrac- tive and there’s a premium that people are willing to pay to live in those kinds of neighbor- hoods. So, what we want to do is create some- thing in Canada that we don’t have at this point, which is a joint voice for walkability, by bringing together all the groups that have an interest. We’re working on getting everybody together next September in a national meeting that will be a launch for this campaign and an organized voice for walking.” “I can give you a long stream of reasons why a walkable neighborhood is a great thing from a point of view of health and everyday physical activity; from the point of view of the environment; and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions,” Maynes continues. “But one of the reasons why I’m very opti- mistic, now, that we’re going to start making a lot of progress, is the economic one. We know that people want to live in walk- able communities; that there’s been a real shift in consumer preferences. So, there’s that kind of economic driver. There’s also the economic driver of major corporations moving from suburban corporate parks into downtowns because the kind of employees they want to attract want to be there where the action is; they want to be on the street; they want to be able to leave the car at home and take public transportation to work. It’s these kinds of economic drivers that the environmental community has become very aware of. They’re a great hook for getting support for policies that we might be promoting for Our members are community-based non-profits that work in all kinds of ways to engage people at home, in their busi- nesses, at play, etc., in taking practical, positive action for the environment and for a sustainable economy. Clifford Maynes Green Communities’ Executive Director