Innovation Anthology #144:

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Imagine floating down the river, your canoes strapped together to carry an outhouse into the wilderness. That’s school work for students at David Thompson High School in Condor, Alberta.

Their river stewardship program won them a 2008 Emerald Award for Environmental Excellence. Teacher Mike Horembala tells the story.

MIKE HOREMBALA: About eleven or twelve years ago we started going out and monitoring the North Saskatchewan River which is in our backyard. It runs through Rocky Mountain House and area. And we started doing water quality testing as well as terrestrial studies and just measuring impact of humans recreationally out in the west country.
The students took all the data, they analyzed it, assessed it, and put it together and they came up with some stewardship projects that they wanted to introduce.

The first thing, the most obvious sign of human abuse is often human waste. And that was one that kind of grossed them out the most. So a lot of our projects have been trying to mitigate the impact by putting in things such as stairs or bridges out of the river and into the campsites to cut down on erosion. And we been building and carrying downstream outhouses or garden thrones as we call them.

So far the students from David Thompson High School have placed their environmenta friendly outhouses along several rivers – the North Saskatchewan, Athabasca, Red Deer and Milk Rivers.

FOR INNOVATION ANTHOLOGY
I’M CHERYL CROUCHER