Love is the force that makes us fully human.

As parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts we need to start getting out into nature with the young people in our lives. Families play a key role in getting kids outside.

Human beings are often at their best when responding to immediate crises - car accidents, house fires, hurricanes. We are less effective in the face of enormous but slow-moving crises such as the loss of biodiversity or climate change.

When I was a kid, being outside was the norm. Rain or shine, our parents would tell us to get out of the house.

Just as human activity is upsetting Earth's carbon cycle, our actions are altering the water cycle.

There are some things in the world we can't change- gravity, entropy, the speed of light, and our biological nature that requires clean air, clean water, clean soil, clean energy and biodiversity for our health and well-being. Protecting the biosphere should be our highest priority or else we sicken and die. Other things, like capitalism, free enterprise, the economy, currency, the market, are not forces of nature, we invented them. They are not immutable and we can change them. It makes no sense to elevate economics above the biosphere.

If Canada, one of the richest nations in the world, can't meet Kyoto targets, why should China or India give any considerations for meeting the targets?