In Ontario’s City of Kawartha Lakes and Peterborough, shoppers can find loads of creators to help stock their cupboards, wardrobes, and minds, all the while decreasing their environmental footprint.

Now, Willard is an artist, curator, and assistant professor at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Okanagan. A mixed Secwépemc and settler, Willard’s research is focused in part on providing a view of the art world in small towns, rural centres, and on reserve. As an artist, curator, and educator, Holly Schmidt is trying to put a frame around something that is often taken for granted: the natural world around us.

Animals adapt, physically and behaviourally, as a means of survival, so they can reach their main food sources, fend off predators, and survive seasonal changes in the weather. Whether we realize it or not, we see the results of animal adaptation all the time, like when carnivorous animals rip flesh with their sharp canine teeth or when prey travel in herds because there is strength in numbers. Survival isn’t the only outcome, however; when animals develop new adaptations, they also develop new relationships with their environments. The monarch butterfly is a great example. Its larvae feed on milkweed leaves, which have a strong, distasteful odour and are poisonous. The monarch adapted so that it is able to digest this poisonous plant and because of its smell, predators keep away from the butterfly and its eggs.

Art is a great way to get creative, fire up different parts of the brain, and see something in a new way. To make colourful, sustainable inks that don’t come with excess packaging or contain microplastics that end up in nature, just reach for plants from the kitchen, forest, or garden.

Born in Little Buffalo, a remote Alberta community ringed by oil extraction efforts, Melina Laboucan-Massimo knows the feeling of being helpless in the face of a warming planet. Every time her family drove across their traditional Lubicon Cree First Nation homelands, the landscape felt drier, its vegetation less vibrant.

The Tla-o-qui-aht Nation’s territory extends from one of the few remaining ancient temperate rainforests down to the Pacific Ocean. It is a place of thousand-year-old cedars up to 12 metres tall. Elk run through the misty woods, and black bears catch salmon as they migrate upstream, pulled back to rivers and streams by an unstoppable urge to spawn the next generation where they themselves hatched.

More students in remote, rural, and Indigenous communities in Canada will have opportunities to become proficient in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), thanks to the Drax Foundation.