How our immediate living environments are also affected by ecosystems changes

BY MICHELLE CLARKE

St. Jamestown is the north end of one of Toronto’s oldest neighbourhoods, Cabbagetown, snuggled between Castle Frank and Sherbourne. The home riding of Canada’s first Female Woman, Caribbean Descendant, and a neighbourhood that I myself frequented growing up and had many high school friends from and in and around that downtown.

The City of Toronto has acknowledged it the most diverse and densest populated neighbourhood in the GTA! Diversity and density are terms that people often ascribe to academia or politics, but these terms should be in our day-to-day vocabulary, as the world around us changes due to the neglect from the pursuit of modernization and industrialization of mass scale productions and natural resource extraction projects. We know that those changes will be experienced in our local communities.

St, Jamestown isn’t the exception, but because of its 20,000+ population compacted into nineteen apartment high-rise apartment towers and four low rise buildings built in the 1960’s, plus many other houses, and small apartments between Bloor, Castle Frank and Sherbourne Streets make the living environment and experience of members more difficult. Climate change is displaying how it affects people living in high-rise towers, still recovering from a massive building fire and struggling with also being one of Toronto’s poorest and overlooked communities.

Yet what I found instead as I led the Research and Development Knowledge Hub  Knowledge Hub, Community Climate Action  for the Community Climate Action project is that St. James Town was full of untapped and overlooked potential of people with high skills sets, education and work experience. ReThink Sustainability Initiatives (RSI), Trinity Life, The Government of Canada and The New Common focused on the City of Toronto Targets and factors that highlight and intensify climate change impacts and health related emergencies focused on St. James Town.

This includes three Climate Action Ambassador Training Workshops, and Green Careers Mentorship and Training Workshops (which I participated in and contributed to); with upcoming “Collaborative Climate Solution Discovery Workshops, Building Assessment Workshops, with On-going Communication Activities.” Community Action in our neighbourhoods is usually focused on gun violence and gangs, it is important for now and our future generations to start effectively addressing how our immediate living environments are also affected by ecosystem changes.