“As climate change ramps up and it’s hotter and hotter in June sometimes we need that (tree) shade,” says Wolseley activist Erna Buffie. The author of the just launched Out On A Limb, says the book is already a best seller at McNally Robinson booksellers, and people are hungry for the kind of information she has researched for the book.
“It’s a personal book and in other ways it’s a kind of practical guide for people who want to get involved in defending and growing their urban forests.”
Buffie looked at how cities across the world are adopting green planning, and “what cities can do to climate-proof their urban centers.”
“As our our weather gets worse and our summers get hotter, the more trees we have, the safer we are,” she says.
“Trees aren’t just architectural embellishments. They don’t just exist to sort of make our city more pretty. They’re really powerful natural infrastructure that give off so many benefits- from mitigating flash floods to most importantly, mitigating “heat island” effects,” she says.
As a member of the citizen group Trees Please, Buffie says that Winnipeg has come a long way, but there is a lot more work to be done.
“We need to start thinking about planning a city that works for us and for nature,” she says.
For about a century, says Buffie, “we’ve busy expelling nature from the city…and now we’re starting to realize that’s maybe a mistake. We have to learn to work with nature to build our cities.”
Some of those benefits include much cleaner air, corridors for wildlife (coyotes live in the city, but we prefer it if we don’t cross paths, she says) flood mitigation (sewer preservation), heart, mental and emotional health, and a myriad of other less known benefits. But hearing the expressions from Winnipeg neighbours helped to cement the importance of writing Out On A Limb for Buffie. “You know, when they removed our boulevard tree, our our house was so hot, I couldn’t believe it. Like I couldn’t believe how much it was mitigating the heat’” a man from the West End told her.
Like many other cities, Winnipeg needs to build its greenery in the inner city, and work on looking after its mature tree canopy – something that at one time put Winnipeg on the map internationally-and takes on the bulk of providing those benefits, she says.

Great Plains City Book Series
“Cities have been copying each other’s homework for decades now, particularly in North America, right?, says Michael Durand-Wood, “so we are all, North-America-wide, facing the same kinds of challenges; a lot of the same kinds of issues are popping up kind of all over the place.”
Durand-Wood has been editing a series of books focusing on some of those urban issues, and says local publisher Great Plain’s book series The City Project “are meant to be really accessible, something you could power through on a Sunday afternoon.”
Like Erna’ Buffie’s Out on a Limb, the series is focusing on city basics, and the level of government that affects us most closely day to day.
“It’s really for the percentage of people that have never really thought about this, but are starting to see the challenges – saying they don’t even know where to start.”
Durand-Wood says he is hoping the books will inspire people to get involved, educate themselves and begin to put in the effort to create “the love and care and stewardship that our cities require.”
“We turn on the tap and clean drinking water comes out, and we don’t even notice that a lot of work and logistics have gone into that. We notice it when it’s not working,” he says.
But in the same way that cities are developing the same problems, Durand-Wood says that good solutions can also be learned from other municipalities, and that Winnipeg has often been a leader in progressive solutions.
“We are kind of the co-owners of our city, right?, he says. “The publishers are hoping this could be a tool that that they can use to help bring more people on board.. the more people we get involved in in building our sustainable future the better,” he says.
“If we we band together, if we start doing the work together, we can improve things.”
The first book in the series You’ll Pay For This, How We Can Afford a Great City for Everyone, Forever was selected for the Manitoba Council for International Cooperation’s Reading List for Global Citizens 2026 and That’ll Never Work Here, Challenging the Myths Around Biking in a Winter City, have already launched with two more books to be published later this year.