B1.1 Technologies and the environment
Example
Assess the impact of a busy highway and a hydroelectric dam on the environment.
- Highway: burning fuel leaves combustion products in the air, and the moving air carries them to whoever breathes downwind of the roads.
- Dam: both directions at once — the same structure that makes electricity without burning also took the valley's habitat when its reservoir filled.
Example
Assess the impact of clearing a woodlot for a subdivision on the environment.
- Clearing: the trees were the habitat — shelter, nesting places and food went with them, so the animals had to move away or dwindle.
B1.2 How well do fixes work?
Example
Evaluate the effectiveness of a wildlife corridor under a road.
- Corridor: it joins the two habitats into one, so animals can now cross under cover, find mates and food in both, and a hard year in one woodlot is no longer the end.
Example
Evaluate the effectiveness of rooftop solar.
- Rooftop solar: the same lights now run on electricity made without burning anything — so somewhere a generating station burns that much less fuel on their account.
Example
Evaluate the effectiveness of using less water in a dry month and replanting a bare slope.
- Less water: every litre not drawn stays in the creek and the ground — water the fish, the frogs and the streamside roots keep. Replanting: the new roots knit the slope's soil back together, so far less earth washes down to cloud the stream.
B1.3 First Nations, Métis, and Inuit practices and perspectives contributing to environmental sustainability
Diverse First Nations, Métis, and Inuit practices and perspectives contribute to environmental sustainability. For thousands of years, Coast Salish and other Pacific Northwest First Nations — including WSÁNEĆ communities — have built and tended clam gardens: low rock walls at the beach's tide line.
Sediment gathers behind the wall until the beach flattens into the tide band where clams thrive — the tended beach grows more clams than an untouched one, year after year.
First Nations in what is now British Columbia — including Secwépemc communities — practise cultural burning: small, cool fires set deliberately in the right season. The low, cool burns clear built-up fuel a little at a time, renewing meadows and berry patches — so the huge uncontrolled fires that thrive on piled fuel are far less likely.
Provincial wildfire programs now work with these communities to bring the practice back.
Example
Explain what Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit — Inuit knowledge built across generations — adds when Nunavut's co-management boards set how many caribou a season can sustain.
- The record of many lifetimes — herd movements, ice conditions, and which changes are truly new.
- Against that record, one season's numbers can be read, and the harvest set sustainably.
Summary
- Roads, clearing and dams each change habitat; some also give.
- Corridors, solar, saved water and replanting each have a measurable effect.
- Tended beaches, cool burns and long records sustain what they manage.