Whether it’s making a beautiful homemade dinner, growing your own food or connecting with neighbours, Patricia Cameron of Green Calgary is dreaming of a more sustainable future from her favourite room — her den.
Research one of activities in room
For Patricia Cameron, executive director of Green Calgary, being green is about “skilling yourself up.”
Whether it’s making a beautiful homemade dinner, growing your own food or connecting with your neighbours, “a lot of people are active in increasing the resilience and sustainability of our city,” she says. “I urge Calgarians to get connected with that and be a part of that future.”
Finding a way to a greener future can be accomplished with the help of an organization like Green Calgary, a local environmental charity.
Since 1978, it has provided hands-on support and sustainability skills development for individuals, families, businesses and community organizations. A membership-based group, Green Calgary “is part of solving the environmental problems that we’re facing,” says Cameron. “The way we do it is by meeting people directly and giving them hands-on support, whether it’s through our business-consulting services, through home visits, our school programs, our rain barrel and composter community sales, or through our Sustainability Series workshops.”
For businesses wanting to reduce their waste and find more efficient ways of operating — and for anyone who is feeling confused or overwhelmed about where to start in going green — Green Calgary is here to help.
Throughout the summer until mid-August, Green Calgary is holding its annual rain barrel and composter community sales.
“If people want to get working on rain harvesting and composting, now is an excellent time to connect with that,” says Cameron. Call the Green Calgary store at 403-230-1443 to pre-order.
Born and raised in Saskatoon, Cameron has a master’s degree in English literature and an MBA. She had planned to be an English professor, but instead spent 15 years teaching public and media relations at the post-secondary level, as well as teaching interpersonal and business communications.
She went into consulting and then management, following her passion for a more compas- sionate society into the realm of non-profit/charitable work. She was executive director of the Calgary Humane Society for five years, leading that organization to national recognition in animal welfare, before becoming executive director of Green Calgary.
I do my writing and a lot of thinking and research there, and my arts materials are there — I do some painting of nature and still lifes. GREEN CALGARY’S PATRICIA CAMERON,
ON HER DEN
Question: Which room in your home is your favourite and why?
Answer: My den. One of the things that makes me love it is that it’s got two windows. Christopher Alexander, author of A Pattern Language, says one of the timeless elements of a room is having two sources of natural light. Two windows create a beautiful quality of light that makes for a much more balanced feel.
The other thing I love is that I am surrounded by books, which are one of my passions.
Question: What activities do you — and other family members — do in this room?
Answer: We listen to music and discuss things. I do my writing and a lot of thinking and research there, and my arts materials are there — I do some painting of nature and still lifes.
My husband and I will often play with our dogs in that room. They like to hang out and sleep in the room while I’m working.
They are two rescue dogs. One is a Shar-Pei and some kind of border collie — she looks like a Shar-Pei, but has black and white speckles — and the other is a shepherd cross.
Question: What is your favourite piece of furniture in this room?
Answer: My desk, which is built into an alcove.
Question: What is your favourite piece of art in this
Cameron and her husband have two grown children and five grandchildren. Their home is a two-storey with a walkout basement in northwest Calgary. room?
Answer: My Lindsay Ingram original. She is an incredibly talented young Canadian artist, a graduate of the Alberta College of Art and Design.
This piece of art depicts a garden in Rosthern, Sask., cultivated by Eric Yoder, a permaculture-intensive gardening guru. He has created a wonderful, almost hobbit-like space in his plot of land.
He is a font of information about sustainable living and creating beautiful spaces. He market gardens into Saskatoon; even his vegetables are a work of art. Question: Who designed this room?
Answer: It happened organically. I did put in the bookcase, but ‘design’ is probably too elevated a word for that.
Question: Is there anything you would change about the room if you could?
Answer: I would probably make it bigger so that I could have even more books.
Question: Do you think of it as exclusively your room only, or one shared with others?
Answer: It’s shared with others — it’s only got a half wall. It’s sort of like a loft room. It’s shared always by my dogs; they love to hang out with me. And my husband wanders in and we share insights.
Question: How long have you lived in your house?
Answer: About a decade.
Question: What community is your house in? What do you like about the area?
Answer: Rocky Ridge Royal Oak. One of the wonderful things I like about my area is our community association, Rocky Ridge Royal Oak Community Association. It’s been really active in doing things like addressing the fact there was going to be a number of oil wells drilled about 400 metres from our school.
The other thing I like about the area is the incredible mountain view. We have a beautiful park on a little bit of an escarpment and you can see the Rockies, the river valley and a great vista every day.
When I go walking with my dogs, I get to enjoy that and I love it.
Question: Have you seen your street and/or community change since you’ve moved there?
Answer: The big change came for me when I got my dogs. When we first moved there we did not have dogs, and like many people in Cal- gary, I did not know my neighbours. Since I got my dogs, I know virtually all of my neighbours, they know me and we know each other’s dogs.
The community association is very active in encouraging those connections and that neighbourly feel. They are encouraging people to walk the neighbourhood, say hello to each other and have events like block parties, so that people can get to know each other.
Question: What do you like most about living in Calgary?
Answer: I like its vibrancy — there is so much going on in Calgary, which just spent 2012 being a Cultural Capital of Canada.
The arts community is growing, people are doing beautiful design work, we are doing visioning in the city with things like imagineCALGARY (a plan for sustainability created through public input; visit the website at imaginecalgary.ca).
There is lots of community gardening. It’s a very alive and exciting place to live.