Greening behaviours using technology

phyllistsang — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 14:11:55 +0000

An 80-year-old church goes green

A server water shortage led a city in Mexico to employ school children to take charge in support of water preservation. These students are changing attitudes and behaviours of their peers and adults.

Matamoros, a northeastern city in Mexico minutes away from Texas, is the last largest city that uses water from Rio Grande, the "Big River" that originates in Colorado. When the river dried up in July 2000, the city's water department resorted to enlisting thousands of schoolchildren as "water detectives"—or "los detectives del agua" in Spanish, to be educated about water preservation, to search and report water leakages and wasteful behaviours around the city, and to educate others about the importance of proper water usage. In 2004, Matamoros consumed 18 per cent less water than in 2003, a result attributed to the tireless water detectives.

"If a 'green culture' is not there," said executive director of Green venture Pete Wobschall after giving the Matamoros' success story as an example during a presentation of an energy audit on Oct. 10, "You are really limiting what technology can do for you."

Greening Sacred Spaces, an imitative to educate faith communities about ecological issues and to help them create sustainable worship spaces, brought on Green Venture, a community-based non-profit organization committed to sustainability. Green Venture was implemented to perform an energy audit on Melrose United Church, an 80-years-old church in downtown Hamilton.

While most people do not have the luxury of a historical church that needs an energy audit, most people do live in homes that could benefit from energy audits.

"We've done an energy audit on a house that is less than two years old." Wobschall thinks that most Canadians do not build with the environment in mind.