One Sunday afternoon over five years ago, Michael Manulak’s father called him into the family room to see a wildlife program on TV. Manulak, at the time an OAC student living in Etobicoke, left his MSN conversation window open and went downstairs.
He was soon left dumbfounded by the sight of an emaciated polar bear struggling on and then crashing through thin arctic ice-another victim of global warming. The polar bear was found the next day, the narrator reported, dead from starvation.
In that instant, Manulak’s goal in life became clear.
“I went up to my room, and I cried my eyes out,” he recalled. “It disturbed me so much that we knew what the problem was, yet we did nothing. I decided then that, if it wasn’t going to be me that would change the world, no one else would.”
To bring about that change and help combat the effects of global warming, Manulak formed a student environmental group in the fall of 2001. He named the group Greenpower, and its first meeting, at Michael Power/St. Joseph High School in Etobicoke, drew five students. The second drew over 40. Greenpower was the first official environmental group at Manulak’s high school, but the interest in environmental issues from students and, increasingly, staff had been there all along.
Manulak is currently completing his fifth year of an undergrad degree in history and Canadian foreign policy, and he has remained executive director of Greenpower since the group’s foundation. He formed the U of T chapter soon after he arrived at St. George campus. Greenpower is now a full-fledged non-profit organization that encourages and facilitates youth-led environmental initiatives on the local and international level. Group activities must fulfill parallel mandates of conservation and education. It is not enough for the group to work for the environment, Manulak believes, unless they are also making younger generations aware of the issues and what they can do to help.
Most significantly to date, Greenpower has opened an active chapter in India and is working on a unique campaign to save the Bengal tiger while helping alleviate poverty in the province of Orissa. Heady stuff for a group that just celebrated its fifth anniversary last October.
The road to India
Five years ago, Manulak and his team couldn’t have imagined that their organization would one day be leading an international project in India. Their first big success was organizing a rally outside the Eaton Centre on “Buy Nothing Day” to raise awareness of the environmental impact of consumer culture. The 17-year-old leader showed some pluck by going on the nightly news and offering an alternative to George W. Bush’s post-9/11 exhortation to keep buying and help defeat terrorism.
Greenpower organized its first Earth Day educational conference for high school students in April, 2002, attracting delegates from as far away as Stratford and Sault Sainte Marie. The conference, which pursues Greenpower’s mandate to educate and empower youth, has grown bigger and more varied over the organization’s five-year history, with last year’s being held in council chambers at Toronto city hall.
After graduating from high school, Manulak had to choose whether or not to keep his nascent environmental group alive. Inspired by the dedicated team of friends who had helped form Greenpower and nurtured its development, he opted to forge on at a time in life when many students let prior commitments slide.
“There was a lot of enthusiasm in myself and others to keep it going. The group has become a close group of friends, and it’s a lot of fun,” he said. Manulak admits that since founding it, his life has revolved around Greenpower. He estimates he puts in 50-60 hours a week as executive director, sacrificing free time and sleep to fulfill his dream of making a difference. “Everything that you do should try to be in line with your passion, with what you’re trying to accomplish,” he said.
Second-year neuroscience student and Greenpower member Linda Zhang says Manulak’s devotion to his cause is inspiring.
“Michael’s really down to earth, and he wants to make a difference. His energy is infectious.”
Much of Manulak’s time is spent researching the issues, meeting with members and potential donors, and organizing events and campaigns. And he does all this while balancing a part-time academic courseload and a side job as a receptionist.
“(Being executive director) has been an absolute disaster from a financial perspective,” Manulak laughs.
The payoff comes through empowering other young people to work for the environment. People like Tricia Kennedy, a first-year student at Victoria College, who joined Greenpower at the clubs fair during Orientation Week, and was elected Secretary/Treasurer earlier this year.
“So many people sign up [for clubs] and nothing happens,” Kennedy said. “But we don’t have to wait around for Superman to affect some sort of local and global change. I’ve seen how powerful a group of committed individuals can be.”
After the move to U of T, Greenpower’s membership expanded to include students from other universities, and a board of directors (made up of lawyers, politicians, and business leaders) was founded to provide guidance to the emerging NGO. Board members have included MPs Ruby Dhalla and Peggy Nash, former Toronto One anchor Ben Chin, Toronto Zoo CEO Calvin White, and Glen Grunwald, formerly of the Toronto Board of Trade.
Dr. Barbara J. Falk, a professor at the Canadian Forces College who once taught Manulak at U of T, spoke about global warming at Greenpower’s 2003 Earth Day conference at the behest of her former student.
Falk found the experience quite impressive, mostly due to Manulak’s commitment. “Mike has the respect of his colleagues, of the young people he has brought together,” said Falk. “He is a good leader for the 21st century” in that “he can guide and motivate others by his own example.”
Save the tiger, save the village
Greenpower’s first foray into international projects came about thanks to a personal choice and some professional analysis. “We wanted to do something for tigers,” Manulak recalls, adding that 95 per cent of the world’s tigers had died during the 20th century. Tigers now number less than 500 worldwide, which, when compared to the approximately 30,000 African lions (a species also considered declining) alive today, illustrates how dire the tigers’ situation is.
Manulak was also looking for a region in the world where no organization had gone before, so he could implement a new kind of environmental project he had been working out for some time.
Traditionally, aid organizations either help local populations at the expense of the environment, or vice versa. Goats are brought into a village, for example, to provide food and income for villagers, but they eat all the grass, starving other species. Or, conversely, forests are declared off-limits to conserve the ecosystem, and people freeze because they are left without firewood.
Manulak and his team of researchers, including close friends and fellow U of T students John Howell and Adrian Morson, spent months trying to find a way to turn the “either/or” approach into a “both/and.”
“We all became conservation biologists for a summer,” said Manulak. After gathering lots of data and comparing the approaches of many different NGOs, the study group finally crafted Greenpower’s “Tiger Conservation and Poverty Alleviation” model, which sees addressing local poverty as inextricably linked to helping the tiger population.
The group quickly realized that such a dual-focused approach had never been tried before. They chose the Orissa province of West Bengal, India, as the place to test their new model.
“Orissa was a really amazing place to try to do this,” said Manulak. “Largely, it was being neglected by global NGOs and the poor state government.” Per capita income is 70 per cent less than the Indian average, added Manulak, and malaria and infant mortality levels are high.
Besides the obvious human needs in the area, the region was also appealing to Greenpower because of a major tiger reserve, known as Similipal, near the villages.
After getting in touch with various Indian NGOs working in the province, the group learned that villagers were forced to forage for wood to build cooking fires and heat their homes because they could not afford fuel. This illegal deforestation of the area around the reserve was depleting the tigers’ natural habitat, and also causing the eradication of their prey species.
Greenpower worked with the Panchayat, or governing council, in the village of Chandanchaturi to try and find a way to lessen further deforestation. These local connections were crucial to success, said Manulak. “We sought a collaborative manner of developing solutions.”
A plan to install biogas units to provide a clean-burning alternative fuel source, ethanol, was deemed acceptable by the council, and Greenpower India was formed to pursue the acquisition and installation of these units.
With funding secured through corporate donations (including a large gift from the Canadian Autoworkers Union) and proceeds from “Tiger Runs” held at local parks and a touring environmental docu-drama theatre performance starring Greenpower members, the organization in Toronto was able to fund the first set of biogas units for the village.
Members are confident that their decision to go global was the right one, said Manulak.
“There was a time we decided that what we were doing was important, and the skills we brought to the table were important, so we began to take the work very seriously.”
Manulak flew to India in early 2005 to meet with government officials and local leaders, plus representatives from various partner NGOs to prepare for the installation of the biogas units. Many villagers turned out to help dig trenches and witness the event.
“There was a genuine excitement, a buzz in the community,” Manulak said, remembering the joy of first seeing a blue flame in Chandanchaturi, a sign that the units were hot enough to serve as fuel for heating homes and powering ovens. These units would not only help preserve the forest, but they are cleaner and safer than wood- burning stoves, and the village women would not need to walk to and from the forest every day to gather wood.
Although Manulak made the trip to India alone to keep costs down, his pictures and journal entries from his stay provided inspiration to the members back home. His stories of excitement and happiness amid what he describes as “desperate poverty” were a stark contrast to Western attitudes toward life.
“[The trips] put a different perspective on the campaigns, since we see the situation from the viewpoints of people we are helping,” said Zhang. Manulak agrees.
“In North America you’re as much defined by what you own and what you can buy. But in Orissa, you’re not being judged by what’s in your driveway, but by your character.”
The conservation project in India is closely linked to Greenpower’s school-building campaign in the region. Though it may seem strange that an environmental charity is building schools, it’s all part of their two-faceted approach to activism. In conjunction with REACH, an Indian NGO that promotes education for all children, especially the handicapped, Greenpower has funded the completion of one school in the village of Pairadanga, and is fundraising to build another near the reserve. If both take hold and are successful, the government is expected to take over funding and maintenance responsibilities within a few years.
The logic of building schools is that educating the children of Orissa will help “break the cycle of poverty and the unsustainable dependence on the ecosystem” by providing conservation alternatives to future generations, said Manulak.
Greenpower and REACH have written a curriculum entitled “Education for Sustainable Development” that will be used in the two schools. According to Manulak, the curriculum sets out to educate both students and their elders to be leaders in conservation. This same goal also inspires the Earth Day conferences and high school outreach efforts in Toronto.
Manulak is clearly proud of these schools. “Planning and coordinating this project gives me a reason to get up in the morning,” he said. “We will absolutely change these students’ lives and improve their prospects.”
During a second trip made one year later to check up on the status of the school and the biogas units, Manulak had the chance to tour the tiger reserve and get up close and personal with wildlife he had loved since he was a kid.
This visit filled him with new energy to continue his work, a drive rooted in faith that comes through in one entry in his travel diary:
“As a young Catholic, I feel the increased necessity to live the message of St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of ecology and wildlife. Driving through the forests of India this week has reinforced a sense of urgency in our faith community’s call to action. We should be guided by the sacred balance, harmony, and spirituality of St. Francis as we live with future generations and the frailty of our planet foremost in our mind.”
Towards a green future
Greenpower seeks to continue focusing on education as a way to promote biodiversity and conservation by creating international volunteer opportunities for Greenpower members to work in India. The group has also begun to provide guidance and micro-grants to high school environmental groups that submit funding proposals for small-scale projects at their schools.
“Greater community outreach, particularly to local schools, can encourage future leaders to speak up and make a stand,” said Tricia Kennedy of Greenpower at U of T.
With many of the original members either set to graduate or already in grad school, Greenpower is poised for “a fundamental transition” this May, said Manulak. Greenpower has established itself as a U of T group with an international reach. It’s a perfect fit for the university, says Falk.
“U of T is a downtown campus. In fact, it is an inner-city campus. The environment isn’t just about parks or forests or saving animals-in Toronto it’s the garbage problem, or air quality. Students living downtown understand this challenge,” she said.
She encourages the group to take advantage of the hub of “concentrated governance” near the downtown campus, with Queen’s Park, city hall, and various NGOs and think-tanks providing “many different entry points” to engage the political process and effect policy change.
Manulak is not sure how long he will continue to head the group he founded over five years ago. He will likely be going out of town for grad school, and doesn’t want to disrupt the new core of volunteers that has emerged.
Whether he stays on or not, he can take pride in the fact that his group’s work is truly making a difference.
“I’ve seen it,” he stated simply. “Our work is a reflection of the idealism of young people who want to make the world a better place.”
For more on Greenpower Canada and its current campaigns, see www.greenpowercanada.org. To meet with members and learn more about the group, visit the Greenpower booth at the Environmental Careers Expo at Hart House on Thursday, March 1, from 10 a.m.-4 p.m.
