Kings North
Candidate: Anna-Maria Galante-Ward
Website: http://KingsNorthGreen.ca
Email: kingsnorth@greenparty.ns.ca
Anna-Maria Galante-Ward can't sit easily on a piano bench while the polar caps melt. So she has offered to represent the Green Party of Nova Scotia in Kings-North. "I love working with kids. But how can I sit on the sidelines and clap while their future evaporates?" says the 40-year-old mother of three who quit journalism for self-employment as a music teacher. "The environment is their future - our future. I can't advocate for the dignity of children anywhere without advocating for the environment."
Anna Maria, who was born in Halifax, first moved to Kentville in 1990 to work in the Valley Bureau of The Chronicle-Herald. In 1993, she married Kevin Ward, a chemical engineer from Bridgetown, and they live in Coldbrook with their three daughters. After giving birth to one child in 1997, and then twins in 1999, Anna Maria put aside plans to return to daily newspaper reporting.
After several years of part-time reporting for local weeklies, she left paid journalism in 2006 to 'call her own shots.' "I wanted to be in charge of the time I spent with my kids, and I wanted to openly express opinions," she says: "You can moderate to excess - and at that time, the balance claimed around climate change reporting was not truth; and to say so was considered opinion."
In November of 2006, Anna Maria organized a 30-person relay to walk, bike and bus a copy of An Inconvenient Truth to the Legislature. "It served its purpose," she says of both the effort and the movie: "It started the discussion about the concrete consequences of our consumption habits. We can't pretend anymore."
The Nova Scotia government since that time has acknowledged the problem and taken steps to act, she says - with federal money - but proposed emission caps will only bring a 10 % reduction from 1990 levels by 2020. "Even if NSPI met their original goal to generate 18.5% of our power from renewable resources by 2013 - we should be reducing emissions by the same amount - otherwise these alternative sources of energy are only expanding our capacity to consume."
Anna Maria was invited to attend Al Gore's training session in Montreal last spring but was busy planning Earth Day activities at Coldbrook School. She warns,"The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is already 387 ppm. The inter-governmental panel on climate change says 350 ppm is what can be safely absorbed. It would be nice for the moms of this generation to have the luxury of seeking agency when their kids are grown up. But we don't have that kind of time. We have 100 months to turn things around - not 100 months to get started."
Anna Maria, who has taught Sunday School since 2000 at St. James Anglican Church, believes there are moral implications, not just to climate change, but resource depletion, and the loss of biodiversity, that go far beyond the failure or success measures of the traditional growth model. "Biodiversity is our life support system. 'If Mother Nature ain't happy, ain't nobody happy.' "
Since 2006, Anna Maria has advanced these arguments on a number of local issues: presenting to the joint federal-provincial panel on the White's Point Quarry in Digby Neck, and to municipal council on the loss of Kings County farmland to development interests. She was also a volunteer editor of the Green Party of Nova Scotia's newsletter in its initial months. She has worked to establish an environmental sub-committee of the Home & School Association at Coldbrook School, and school garden, and has accepted numerous speaking engagements to raise awareness of the urgency of the small and large actions required to keep our place in a world straining to sustain us.
Anna Maria has an honours degree in journalism from Carleton University in Ottawa, and graduated with a specialty in science reporting. She met David Suzuki in 1990 in the course of preparing an honours research paper on environmental illness, research she began during internship at The Chronicle-Herald in the late '80s. In 2007, she was one of four people to represent the diocese at the Anglican Church of Canada's Eco-Justice Conference in Victoria, B.C.