Earth Day 2023
Our Victoria office took an Earth Day field trip to Highrock Cairn park in Victoria, to join volunteers in removing invasive species (and feeding them to goats).
To celebrate earth day this year, our Victoria office took a field trip to Highrock Cairn park in Esquimalt (a Victoria Suburb), to participate in an event organized by the local parks department. The event was listed online, advertising volunteer ecosystem education, trail building, and invasive species removal. We found very few practical details, so we arrived at the park with shovels and gloves, looking for signs of activity.
We arrived to find a group learning about the different plants that grow in the park, both indigenous and invasive. We joined the group, hoping they’d lead us to the work party, but they were moving slowly, so we continued on our own. After a self-guided tour of the little park, we found ourselves at the centre of a spirited Earth Day work party.
One of the enthusiastic event volunteers showed us where we could get tools, and briefed us on which plants needed to be removed: Himalayan Blackberry, English Ivy, and Daphne. We spent the next couple of hours working furiously to snip, dig, pull, and make piles from all of the invasive plants were moved from our assigned area. We worked hard, buoyed by the energy of the many other volunteers, and finished up with a smile on our faces and a sense of having accomplished something tangible in our community.
It’s gratifying to get outside and work in the dirt, but the important work of living regeneratively comes in the small choices we make in our daily lives
A few hours of manual labour seems like a small and symbolic gesture, but multiplied by the dozens of other volunteers at the event, it amounted to several acres of parkland that now provide the conditions for indigenous species to thrive. We are firm believers in the idea that small actions, repeated regularly, can affect meaningful change.
It’s gratifying to get outside and work in the dirt, but the important work of living regeneratively comes in the small choices we make in our daily lives: Do we take the car or the bicycle? Do we throw it in the garbage, or recycle it? Maybe it's compostable? Do we choose to products made from plastics, or from natural sources?
On the journey toward a regenerative future, we choose the naturally renewable path, and through the redesign of daily-use products we are working to make this path accessible to everyone.
