CBC’s The Nature of Things (now in its 61st season!) has an inspiring episode featuring easy and effective ways to Curb Your Carbon. A great antidote to feeling overwhelmed and powerless when considering the global problem of climate change, the show offers many practical and empowering ideas for ways that individual people and families can make a difference — eating less meat, reducing food waste, or repairing your cell phone instead of throwing it out, and a few simple steps to improving your car’s fuel efficiency by 20 percent.
Great for adults and kids, the show goes to great lengths to also be entertaining, including recruiting the funny and charming Canadian star Ryan Reynolds to narrate. It also stars:
- A family of garbage stealing Ninjas
- A bug exterminator who eats crickets, grasshoppers and scorpions
- A class of students who cut C02 by fixing their phones
- A racing driver who never hits the gas
- An activist who turns plastic waste into amazing art
- Competing twins who race across a city from A to B to reduce C02
- A group of tree-planting women in Kenya
- A culinary double dare involving a New Zealand rugby team and a mob of methane-producing sheep
The show also uses great animated images to help viewers wrap their minds around the numbers involved. For example, it shows how much electronic waste is thrown out each year in an equivalent mass of pyramids, or tonnes of carbon emissions in how many Roman colosseums that amount would fill.
Curb Your Carbon can be seen any time for free on CBC’s free streaming app Gem.
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