ecoAdaptive Strategies

Barbara D. Janusz BA, LLB Consulting

Home of the ecoSWOT and of author, Barbara D. Janusz.  I launched the ecoadaptivestrategies website in 2010 while waiting (impatiently) to hear about my first novel, Mirrored in the Caves, published in 2012 by Inanna Publications and Education Inc., an academic press, affiliated with Canadian Women Studies at York University.

Rather than conceiving a new website with my name as the domain name, I’ve aspired to integrate my passion for environmental activism with writing.

I taught Business Law and Introductory Management at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta from 2001 to 2005. The focus of the planning function in Management is the SWOT – an indispensable tool for economic stewardship and formulating short or long-term business strategies. An analysis (or audit or assessment) of the internal – strengths and weaknesses over which an enterprise exerts control – and external factors – opportunities and threats, ascertained through environmental scanning – the SWOT has undergone a transition through the incorporation of the Triple Bottom Line.

A new measure of performance linking economic, social and environmental (profit, people and the planet) elements, the Triple Bottom Line positions organizations to adopt more resilient strategies, and to become stewards of the economy in which they operate; to reduce an organization’s carbon footprint.

In 2020, as an intervenor in the Grassy Mountain Coal Project joint review hearing, I made submissions and cross-examined the proponent, Benga Mining’s witnesses in opposition to the development of a metallurgical coal mine in Crowsnest Pass and the MD of Ranchlands, in the southwest corner of Alberta. As a resident of Crowsnest Pass since 2005, and having cultivated a multidisciplinary background as a lawyer, writer and Management instructor, I was well positioned to impress upon the joint review panel the unsustainability of the project in a region of Alberta that was successfully developing its tourism industry. On June 17, 2021, the Joint Review Panel dismissed the proponent’s application for approval of the mine on the grounds that Benga Mining had failed to establish that the project was in the public interest; that the projected economic returns of the mine did not justify the foreseeable environmental degradation to southern Alberta’s Eastern Slopes and the South Saskatchewan River watershed.