Green Cottager Guide

This guide is a comprehensive compilation that includes valuable information as well as useful tips on how you can become a green cottager. Also consider the "Quick Tips Reference Guide," a condensed version of the handbook containing just the tips. Download both now.

Download the Green Cottager Guide:

These are PDF documents

Manitoba's spectacular wild places offer abundant opportunities for relaxing, recreating, and connecting with nature. Natural lands and waters provide inspiration to the many people who have chosen to purchase or build a cottage inwilderness country.

Few people have a better opportunity to observe the effects of human activities and pollution on the wilderness than cottagers, many of whom return each year to the same location and whose knowledge of the local area may have been passed down by previous generations. With over half a million cottages across Canada, cottagers, as a group, can have quite a positive or negative impact on the environment.

For cottagers to continue fully enjoying their homes away from home, it's essential they take measures to ensure their environmental footprint is as small as possible. Collectively, taking positive steps based on informed choices will help keep our treasured sanctuaries clean and healthy for future generations of wildlife and people.

The Green Cottager Guide is intended for use by individual cottagers, cottage associations, non-governmental environmental
organizations, and all other citizens with an interest in preserving the natural beauty and functions of the ecosystems where they live, work and enjoy outdoor activities.

The guide is a comprehensive compilation that includes valuable information as well as useful tips on how you can
become a green cottager. Download this handbook for reference, or print it to keep at the cottage, and share it with friends and neighbours. Consider printing the "Quick Tips Reference Guide," a condensed version of the handbook containing just the tips, to post on your cottage fridge.

We hope the Green Cottager Guide finds a useful place in your cottage and helps you do your part in keeping Manitoba's wilderness beautiful and well for all.

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The Sustainable Development Innovations Fund with Manitoba Conservation provided funding for this project.

New report: Traditional aboriginal knowledge key to Boreal Forest conservation

Traditional knowledge held by Canada's Aboriginal people about the Boreal Forest offers western scientists a vitally important information source, according to a report published by the David Suzuki Foundation, the Canadian Boreal Initiative, and the Boreal Songbird Initiative.

The report, Conservation Value of the North American Boreal Forest from an Ethnobotanical Perspective, describes the deep botanical and ecological knowledge that Canada's Aboriginal peoples have gained over thousands of years of using the Boreal Forest as grocery, pharmacy, school, and spiritual centre.