Green Venture’s stewardship program is devoted to supporting youth climate activists in the Steel City
C/O Emma Shemko
By: Emma Shemko, Arts & Culture Contributor
Climate anxiety is increasingly becoming a universal experience. In the face of severe climate events, there is a sense of impending doom weighing us all down. From the devastating floods in Pakistan to the wildfires in British Columbia and the degradation of Indigenous lands, many of us are beginning to wonder if we’re watching our futures go up in smoke. However, organizations such as Green Venture, a local not-for-profit, are providing ways to take action.
One way Green Venture offers youth to take action is through their stewardship program, YouthQuake. The program aims to engage youth aged 14 to 24 in leading environmental conversations and hands-on activities.
“The best way to alleviate climate anxiety is taking action and YouthQuake can be a great place to do just that,” said Heather Govender, program manager at Green Venture.
YouthQuake runs both online and in-person on the second and fourth Wednesdays of every month. Long-term commitment is not required to attend these meetings and in-person meetings take place at the EcoHouse on 22 Veevers Dr., the home base of Green Venture.
Youth are a critical component in the fight to mitigate the climate crisis. Although their concerns about climate change are often cast aside, they continue to fight, inspire and demand climate justice and young people often have far more influence on elected representatives and big corporations than older generations realize.
“I think it's important to give [youth] a platform to find and use their voices and to tell our elected representatives what they want to see if that's where things go and just learn how they can make a positive impact,” said Govender.
I think it's important to give [youth] a platform to find and use their voices and to tell our elected representatives what they want to see if that's where things go and just learn how they can make a positive impact."
Heather Govender, program manager at Green Venture
Giving youth a spotlight to express their concerns and always showing them their voices matter is one important step older generations can take to help create a healthier planet for all.
“Regardless of whether you consider yourself an environmentalist, you're completely dependent on the planet. This is where we get our food, our water. Good food to eat, clean air to breathe and clean water to drink is absolutely essential to every single person on the planet,” said Govender.
The Silhouette attended YouthQuake’s Sept. 28 meeting. Young activists—Aria Dalla Pasqua, Emelea Shaua, Isabella Goldner and Jasmine Montrichard—led a gardening activity to promote the idea of maintaining healthy forests and increasing wildlife diversity.
They practiced how to properly plant seeds to grow food from home and reduce energy consumption. They also made planter boxes intentionally designed to increase the variety of plant choices for pollinators. In previous meetings, activities and conversations were centered around gardening, supporting bee and bird populations, foraging, waste management and fast fashion.
There is lot of pressure is placed on individuals, particularly youth to change the world, but not everyone has the resources to do so. Sustainable consumer choices such as avoiding fast fashion brands, going vegan, or purchasing natural products are too expensive for many university students who are on a budget. But YouthQuake can be a great starting point for those who are new to environmentalism and want to kickstart their journey as activists.
"Remember to be forgiving of yourself. It does not rest solely on your shoulders to save the planet. We're limited by the options that are available to us,” said Govender.
"Remember to be forgiving of yourself. It does not rest solely on your shoulders to save the planet. We're limited by the options that are available to us."
Heather Govender, program manager at Green Venture
She also kindly encourages McMaster students to get involved.
“McMaster students should join YouthQuake because it is a safe, positive space to decompress and talk about whatever environmental topics are on your mind,” explained Govender.
Climate doomism doesn’t have to signify an ending. Instead, fears can be turned into positive action, through programs such as Green Venture's YouthQuake.
By Ember, Contributor
cw: fatphobia, disordered eating
Food is what fuels our bodies. So why is it that there is an ever increasing rise of popularity in dieting and diet culture? A movement that encourages us to deprive ourselves; to aspire to be thin. To put it plainly? A hatred for fat bodies that results in widespread disordered eating.
The way we frame different topics and discussions is very important. This especially applies to the way we talk about food, our bodies and other people’s bodies.
Caloric science is based on outdated Western scientific methods from the nineteenth century by Wilbur Atwater. It is the estimate of how much energy is contained in a portion of food by burning it in a tank submerged in water, and measuring how much burning the food increased the temperature of the surrounding water.
However, it is hard to accurately predict the energy stored in food; our bodies do not work as simply as a furnace burning fuel. There are many factors that influence the calories of the foods we eat, like how the food is prepared, if cellulose is present and how much energy it takes to digest the food.
Not to mention, there are additional factors that affect digestion, such as metabolism, age, gut bacteria and physical activity. Labels on food do not accurately represent what we’re putting into our body nor what we’re getting out of it.
Ever since Canada enforced the Healthy Menu Choices Act back in 2016, which requires food establishments to list the amount of calories in their products, there has also been an increasing number of discussions surrounding the negative impact of the addition of calories to menus.
Another measurement that is often used to determine how healthy we are is body mass index, even though it is an inaccurate measurement of “health” for multiple reasons. It was meant to analyze the weight of populations, not individuals, and doesn’t take into account whether mass is fat or muscle. As a result, BMI is a biased and harmful method to gauge health.
Along with measurements like calories and BMI, language surrounding food can also be dangerous. You may hear things like “carbs are bad”, or you may hear discourse on “healthy” versus “unhealthy” foods, “cheat days” and “clean eating”, to name some examples. This language can contribute to the notion that we should feel bad for eating food, when it simply is a way to nourish ourselves and additionally, something to enjoy.
Diet culture is so pervasive and present in society. It is encouraged by menus listing calorie amounts, peers, elders and healthcare professionals in various ways. Thoughts like “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” stem from conflating “health” and “weight”, which has roots in racism, classism and fatphobia.
Diet culture is so pervasive and present in society. It is encouraged by menus listing calorie amounts, peers, elders and healthcare professionals in various ways. Thoughts like “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” stem from conflating “health” and “weight”, which has roots in racism, classism and fatphobia.
Hannah Meier, a dietitian who contributed to a project tackling women’s health, writes about how society glorifies dieting. In Meier’s article titled A Dietitian’s Truth: Diet Culture Leads to Disordered Eating she writes, “I was half-functioning. I remember filling pages of journals with promises to myself that I wouldn’t eat. I planned out my week of arbitrary calorie restrictions that were shockingly low and wrote them all over my planner, my whiteboard, the foggy mirror in the bathroom.”
For many of us, the mindset of diet culture swallows you whole, consumes your every thought and waking moment, then spits you out like rotten food.
Oftentimes, people aren’t advocating for diets because they want to be “healthy”. Instead, they often feel passionate about dieting because of their hate and disdain for fat people since they associate being “fat” with “unhealthy”, “unhappy” or “unlovable”.
It’s also important to note that views on fatness and fat bodies change depending on the time period and culture; renaissance paintings often depict fat women in angelic and celestial aesthetics. As well, certain cultures, both past and present, value fatness as a symbol of privilege, power, wealth and fertility.
Diet culture, eating disorders, and fatphobia are so tightly knit together that they are like an ill-fitting sweater woven by your grandmother that you didn’t want or ask for. Sometimes you think about wearing it, to make things easier or simpler. But it won’t. You will only become a shell of your former self; a husk that is barely scraping by.
Any joy derived from depriving yourself is temporary. A scale will weigh how much of you is there, but it won’t weigh how much of you has been lost to an eating disorder. It is a mental illness, a distortion of reality and external factors that influence how you think. You can’t just stop having an eating disorder on a whim.
Calorie counting isn’t healthy, demonizing certain foods isn’t healthy and having preconceived notions about someone’s health based on how their body looks isn’t “just caring about their health.” Stop calling food “unhealthy” or “healthy”, start calling it “nourishing” or “not/less nourishing. Eat food that makes you happy and makes you feel good. Bodies are so many things, including wonderful and complex. You only have one — so treat it with kindness.
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By Anonymous
The Silhouette needs to do a better job of scrutinizing student politics, especially pertaining to the McMaster Students Union. A free press is essential to holding governing bodies accountable, but unfortunately, the Silhouette is letting the McMaster Students Union get away with a lot more than it should.
Currently, the Silhouette’s news section is mostly a pro-establishment mouthpiece: it gives the MSU a platform to broadcast its messages, but rarely challenges what the MSU puts out. Critical and insightful articles on political issues, such as the Maroons investigation, are the exception when they should be the norm.
For example, last month, in the midst of the Student Choice Initiative opt-out period, the Silhouette simply summarized political talking points from the MSU board of directors, instead of seriously analyzing or critiquing what our student government had to say. As a result, the MSU is able to brush its problems under the rug, and the Silhouette rarely bothers to question what the MSU publicly says. This apathy is unfortunately not new.
In 2016, the Student Representative Assembly ordered the MSU to lobby for the removal of Glenn De Caire, McMaster’s director of Parking and Security Services. While the Silhouette has covered two protests against De Caire and a tribunal case, the Silhouette has never reported on how the MSU responded. Even though the MSU has failed to produce results for the past three years, the Silhouette has neglected to report on why this is the case, or call out our student leaders for failing at their jobs.
In July, when MSU president Joshua Marando called for the Student Representative Assembly to de-ratify the Dominion Society, the Silhouette closely followed the MSU’s lead. Rather than asking difficult questions — such as why Marando personally voted to ratify the club on July 21, despite an SRA member publicly voicing concerns on June 23 about alleged white supremacist connections — the Silhouette simply copied and pasted from his public statement for their news headline. Rather than holding our elected officials accountable for overlooking the white supremacy concerns, the Silhouette literally parroted the words of a politician scrambling to contain a political scandal.
Finally, just last Thursday, the Silhouette reported that the SRA de-ratified the Chinese Students and Scholars Association — a full week after Hong Kong’s SCMP got there first — but quickly retracted their online article. The article failed to acknowledge the evidence in the The Globe & Mail of the CSSA’s connections to the Chinese Communist Party, failed to consider any of the documents on the SRA website and failed to investigate rumours that the MSU board has been trying to avoid or hush this issue.
I am not alleging that there is censorship — after all, these examples have each received at least some coverage in the Silhouette. Rather, the Silhouette rarely follows up on political articles, thus allowing the MSU to simply wait for controversies to blow over. What limited political coverage there is usually just summarizes or repeats what the MSU says, such as with the Dominion Society. Anything more substantial, such as last week’s CSSA article, is often not thoroughly investigated.
The articles on the MSU’s failed lobbying strategies regarding De Caire, the real reasons behind the clubs department’s recommendation to ratify the Dominion Society (after having already heard of white supremacy concerns) and the MSU board’s mysterious avoidance of the CSSA issue could all easily be front page headlines. This makes the Silhouette’s lack of reporting all the more inexplicable.
If the Silhouette is going to prioritize sundry stories like new buildings on campus over political controversies in the MSU, then their content is insufficient. Students are kept in the dark about the MSU’s internal problems, voter turnout is low because of our student paper reporting in-depth on politics only once a year during presidential elections and the lack of public scrutiny means the MSU board feels little pressure to treat the SRA as anything more than a rubber stamp.
We need a dedicated section for student politics, like with sports or arts and culture, to provide in-depth, year-round political coverage. Alternatively, at the very least, there could be a designated political correspondent, or the news section could up the quantity and quality of their political stories.
A student paper that uncovers the ongoings of the MSU each week would significantly help improve transparency, students would be engaged with politics year-round and ultimately, the MSU would become more democratic due to improved public oversight. The Maroons investigation is merely a taste of what’s possible if only the Silhouette was more inquisitive and kept the MSU on its toes.
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By Ouss Badran, Contributor
cw: mentions of homophobia, transphobia, ableism
A concerning trend that I’ve noticed — especially in more socially aware places such as university — is people adopting the label of “ally” and not actually doing anything about being one. In other words, they’re reaping the positive status of the word without actively being an ally.
What do I mean by this? There seems to be a misunderstanding when it comes to what being an ally actually entails. I can tell you that it isn’t like an article of clothing you can put on or take off at your convenience. Those who are actually marginalized can’t shed their identity at a moment’s notice, so neither should you.
So what actually is an ally? Well, for one, allies are people who are not part of the marginalized group for which they are advocating for. You don’t have to necessarily know what it feels like to be oppressed or experience the difficulties that marginalized groups go through. All being an ally means is that you are taking on and understanding their struggle with them.
If you’re new to the concept of allyship, being an advocate is a great start! This means, for example, not just claiming the title of ally because you watch RuPaul’s Drag Race, but actually fighting for better LGBTQ+ representation in the media.
Additionally, this also includes defending said marginalized groups when they’re not in the room, and especially when they are. What do I mean by this? On a more subtle scale, calling out bigoted comments such as “that’s so gay” or the use of the r-word publicly challenges the status quo and reinforces that these sorts of comments are not okay in any shape or form.
On the more extreme end, if you see a marginalized person disparaged in public or even private spaces, it’s your responsibility as an ally to stand up for them. Yes, that includes your racist grandparents and it also includes your parents who “just don’t understand all that transgender nonsense”.
While I don’t want to get too much into the intricacies of intersectionality (as it deserves its own article), I do want to touch on privilege. Most of us have it in some way, shape or form. Nowadays, the very word sets people on edge, and some people may even get defensive. Don’t worry straight, white dudes, I’m not going to attack you. For the sake of this article, privilege is an aspect of society or reality that you don’t have to worry about, but something that another marginalized group does.
For example, I’m speaking mainly from my experiences as a gay, able-bodied and cisgender man of colour. I face certain issues that are relevant to me and other people of my background, but I also lack knowledge and perspective on what it’s like to be a woman, a person under the trans umbrella or someone who has a physical disability. Being aware of your own privilege as an ally can potentially help you understand the struggles of the groups you’re advocating for.
Also, I mean this with all due respect, but if you are an ally, it isn’t about you. Bragging about how you support the Black Lives Matter movement, or about how you “only volunteer at camps for kids with special needs” makes you come off in a not-so-positive light. Specifically, it makes you look like you’re using these groups for your own social gain. Rein in the saviour complex and instead have some respect for those around you who fight for social justice out of a need to survive, not because it looks good on a resume.
So, if I’ve successfully convinced you to change your ways, there’s just one more thing for me to address with you. It’s that making mistakes is completely okay. Everyone has to learn somehow! Acknowledge it, accept responsibility, learn from it and move on equipped with the knowledge you have now.
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