Good Day, Everyone!
I would like to share with you an article that features a very cool program we have here in Pinawa, which is our Junior Kindergarten Forest School. This program was spearheaded by Mrs. Michelle Long, who is an amazing educator in our community. My daughter, Emma, was in Forest School last year at F.W. Gilbert and she had a great experience. What an amazing introduction into school! This year there are 19 kids enrolled!!
CBC Gem produced a documentary on Forest Schools in Manitoba and features Pinawa and F.W. Gilbert School (Pinawa comes in around the 17:00 mark). This type of programming is very attractive to many young families. It demonstrates how Education as one of our economic development pillars, and recognizing the Environment as the foundation, provides a unique opportunity for our community; One that we should continue to promote as a society, and as individuals. Pinawa is lucky to have many people, like Michelle, who contribute to making this community such a special place! You are awesome!
Speaking of Education and Environment, don’t forget that Carbon Lock is having an open house today from 15:00 to 16:30 at the LGD Maintenance Yard where you can learn about their new technology! Hope to see some of you there today!
All the best,
Michael King
Michael King 
Hi Michael! Love your monthly updates and share with Todd at work wondering if you could do in print so I could share with our new members/old so they can see and maybe more you’d prescribe to your emails?
Sent from my iPhone
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Thanks for your kind words, Lisa. I’m glad you are enjoying my writing. I would love to be able to share with more people, I’ll get in touch with you how we can make that happen. Take care!
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…regarding the Carbon Lock Technologies.
This is a 100% a lost battle of what nature could achieve if we let nature do what it knows to do pretty good, Growing Trees!
Which would bring me back to the Forrest school!
The world’s biggest carbon removal plant (removing it from the air), only negates 3 seconds of world CO2 production each year of operation. A year has 31,536,000 seconds so you would need over 10 millions of those plants, to make it neutral.
…and here do the trees come back into play. Planting around 20 million trees would have the same effect.
Planting this amount of trees is much cheaper and more sustainable, ending up with a natural product as base material for building and so much more.
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Thank you Steffen for your comment. You are right, plants are natural carbon scrubbers! Photosynthesis captures the carbon from the air (CO2) and sequesters it in the form of hydrocarbons in the biomass of the tree itself. The issue is that at the end of the plant’s life the carbon may cycle back into the atmosphere. In the case of inefficient organic municipal waste disposal, we either burn the leaves, releasing CO2 as a product of combustion, or allow the anaerobic decomposition of the leaf piles which may form Methane (CH4) which has an even more significant greenhouse gas effect than CO2. I agree with you that plants (the kind that grow) are the best way to remove carbon from the air and transform it to solid carbon states, and in a purely utilitarian sense those materials such as wood or hemp textiles can also be useful for humans. The niche for a company like Carbon Lock is to capture the carbon that is sequestered in “non-useful” materials such as grass clippings and raked leaves, and “lock” the carbon in the form of solid biochar. Not only this, but hopeful improvements to the technology would allow for the simultaneous capture also of H2 Hydrogen!
We need to plant more trees, and I am working on a project to achieve this in Pinawa. Like you, I do not believe that humans will invent in a machine in the next 20 years that can scrub atmospheric CO2 more efficiently than plants, but technology like what Carbon Lock is developing can supplement this cycle and mitigate an important aspect of greenhouse gas emissions that is currently part of municipal waste.
Thanks for writing and allowing me the chance to geek out on science. Takes me back to my university days! (Before switching to the Arts (Politics/French) I was in the Sciences for Biochemistry and Organic Chem).
Cheers!
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