These in-their-own-words pieces are told to Patricia Lane and co-edited with input from the interviewee for the purpose of brevity.
Aloïs Gallet empowers school children, their families and teachers to tell new stories we need to keep the planet habitable. Together with cofounder Alexa Camargo, this West Vancouver social entrepreneur set up Econova to deliver school-based workshops, programs and contests across Canada that help educators to shape tomorrow’s eco-conscious citizens.
Tell us about your project
We shift cultures and attitudes by integrating environmental science education and sensibility with arts, language and social studies. We offer online and in-person workshops, programs and writing and music challenges for students, teachers and entire school communities in B.C., Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.
Students learn to observe and identify both beauty and problems and to understand the interconnectedness of ecosystems. We inspire and validate childrens’ natural curiosity about nature and encourage individual and collective responsibility to protect it. For example, elementary school children might grow fungi from a kit and be introduced to the concept of symbiosis by understanding the mutual services provided by trees and fungi in a forest. Younger children might “meet” the monster Wastalot, create a superhero mask and engage in treasure hunting for waste as they work together to defeat it.
Young people might record a rap song about a climate issue of their choice. We also run comic book contests to allow them to imagine a sustainable future.
Our work is designed to be shared with parents and we run professional development for teachers.
What makes it hard?
Educators have many options and since schools do not always have their own budgets for these programs, we are all chasing the same grant money. That funding is increasingly being diverted to meet other educational needs such as diversity, equity and inclusion and mental health. These topics are important, but it seems short-sighted to be taking their funding from the pool available for climate action.
It can be demoralizing when it seems decision makers are not paying sufficient attention to the urgency or size of the climate crisis.
What gives you hope?
Teachers are enthusiastic and with each new cohort the desire to learn and teach this material grows.
People care. We have traction and useful ways of communicating get adopted by others fast. For example, we are now seeing other environmental comic book contests.
Students are energized by the challenge of imagining a sustainable future. This is heartening because we must imagine it to create it.
Once people are educated, they can design the solutions that will work. The French government set up an Convention citoyenne pour le climat, an assembly of 150 randomly selected people, educated them about climate change and tasked them with mapping a pathway to net zero. Their plan was considered the best the country had ever seen. Collective intelligence works!
How did you get into this work?
In 2007, during a study year abroad, I watched Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and read Jancovici’s Le Plein S’il Vous Plait! I learned the importance of energy in the economy and the damage we were doing with the way we now use it. I decided this was so important that I should devote my life to it.
After I immigrated to Canada in 2014, a chance encounter provided me with the opportunity to help bring awareness about these issues into schools. EcoNova started as a way to bring outdoor and hydroponic gardens to students and instil them with agricultural knowledge. In 2023, we reached 4,000 kids in 59 schools.
Do you think the way you were raised influenced you to enter this field?
I spent many happy weekends with my father in a wooded area in Les Ardennes near my city home in France. There was a stream running through it and I was in love with every living thing in the water, especially salamanders. One day we came upon people washing their cars with soap in the stream. My Dad told them they were killing the salamanders, but they insisted they had a right and did not believe him. I understood that what was free and convenient for them would have devastating impacts for the salamanders and nature guardians like me.
Do you have any advice for other young people?
We all make choices. I have found meaning and happiness choosing to work in the service of protecting nature, the climate and, ultimately, peace.
Try to understand how the world works. This is intellectually satisfying and once you have a map you can find your place in it to be relevant.
What about older readers?
I would say: You vote and politicians are well aware of it. Make demands that support our right, and that of our children, to a decent future. The systems that make up our economic and social structures are stories. We cannot change the physics of climate change or the biology of biodiversity, but we can create new stories that actually generate wellbeing.
Aloïs Gallet is a schools-based educator in West Vancouver, British Columbia.
Comments