West Kootenay EcoSociety and Wildsight Launch Sustainability Resource Website
Two Columbia Basin conservation organizations, the West Kootenay EcoSociety and Wildsight, have teamed-up to create, ‘CBgreen’, a website of sustainability initiatives throughout the Columbia Basin. They are appropriately launching the website during the week of Earth Day (April 18th – 25th) in the hopes of providing a useful tool for advancing sustainable change in the Columbia Basin.
Matt Lowe of the EcoSociety said, “The inspiration for this website came at a brainstorming session between a few EcoSociety and Wildsight members where we pondered the need for those in our region doing sustainability work to link-up and know what each other was doing”.
CBgreen got its clever name from Wildsight member, Ingrid Liepa, who saw the opportunity to recognize in the name both the geographical region of the initiative and the sustainability reference, “see be ‘green’”.
According to Wildsight’s Megan Walsh Lohmann, “What you have in this website is a diverse set of listings of personal, organizational, business, and governmental initiatives throughout the Basin designed to lesson our impact on our natural environment and increase our ability to provide for our own needs.”
Two examples of how the website might be used are:
An elementary school teacher in Nakusp who wants to inform his class about what is being done in the West Kootenay to ensure the preservation of wild critters could look for resources under the Conservation, Protection, and Restoration or Education categories; or A farmer in Creston who is developing innovative ways to farm with less fossil fuel inputs, could share her successes with other farmers in the region in the hopes they might adopt her methods.
“We really hope that this will be a “living, growing” website that all those concerned with sustainability will use to support and promote their efforts for the common goal of making the Columbia Basin ‘green’,” said Lowe.
The website has been generously funded by the Columbia Basin Trust that according to their website “Supports the efforts by the people of the Basin to create a legacy of social, economic and environmental well-being and to achieve greater self-sufficiency for present and future generations.”
To access the CBgreen go to: www.cbgreen.ca