Canada's Environmental Voice
This article is part of A\J’s web series Night School. In celebration of back-to-school time and our Night issue, the A\J web team brought you a series of quick lessons, posted between September 16 to October 11, 2013, covering everything from activism tactics and canning tips to how factory farms breed disease.
“What hath night to do with sleep?” proclaimed John Milton in Paradise Lost. Environmental activists, I think, would agree that sleep has very little to do with it because night is not a time for rest but for action. It provides a cloak of invisibility under which they can enact […]
Driven by curiosity, artist and filmmaker Shinpei Takeda travelled with a friend along the west coast of Canada, the US and Mexico to visit immigrant survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs and document their gripping, lingering stories of pain, suffering and loss. His documentary begins with a stark […]
THE DEBATE about the Keystone XL pipeline has dragged on for more than five years now, and it is beginning to look like a petroleum-fuelled version of the Napoleonic Wars. On one side, Big Oil and its revenue-hungry government allies want to maintain the Napoleonic status quo by expanding an aging […]
AFTER ABOUT FIVE MINUTES in darkness, our eyes become up to 30 times more sensitive than they are to bright light. After about a half hour, they become 100,000 times as sensitive.
When it comes to high-speed rail in Canada, there is only one statistic that matters: Canada is currently the only G8 country to not have a high-speed rail network. For a dominion founded on a transcontinental railway (an incredible feat of engineering) and featuring a famous passenger train on the […]
Oh, and the night, the night, when the wind full of cosmic spaceGnaws at our faces – R. M. Rilke, Duino Elegies (trans. Leslie P. Gartner) IF WE CONSIDER the phenomenon of solar flares, Rilke’s description of how cosmic winds sometimes blow in our faces is surprisingly true. Atmospheric auroras, the […]
EARLY SPECULATION on what caused the train disaster in Lac-Mégantic, Québec, in July seems to have settled on the role of the train’s engineer and the railway company’s poor safety record – and penchant for cutting corners. Some attention was also paid to the out-dated technology used for dangerous cargo, […]
Residents opposing the Pickering airport have come to expect the unexpected. In their 40-plus years of struggle against a development many feel prioritizes business interests over prime agricultural farmland, the story has unfolded in fits and starts. Long periods of inactivity on the part of the federal government are punctuated […]
