Canada's Environmental Voice
OUR COLLECTIVE IDENTITY as Canadians and our conception of the environment is largely one of endless forests, untamed rivers and free-ranging wildlife. This vision, however, no longer reflects the reality of most of our lives. Four out of five Canadians live in major cities or their suburbs, far from the […]
WE ARE well into 2008 and there still is no common global name to define this decade. There’s no catchy term like the Roaring Twenties or the Dirty Thirties. These past eight years have remained unnamed and undescribed.
WHEN I BEGAN writing A Scientific Romance 15 years ago, I pictured the ruins our civilization might leave behind if it died from its own folly like so many others. My tale is set in Britain and told by an archaeologist who travels to the year 2500. I made satirical […]
I’VE BEEN THINKING a lot about Sudbury these days. Long the butt of moonscape jokes and widely recognized as one of the world’s “best” examples of industrial pollution, this Northern Ontario town has much to teach us about hope and moving ahead. By the 1970s, after decades of exposure to […]
I OFTEN SAY that my “church” is the one with the great big blue ceiling. People usually chuckle as they grasp my meaning, though I’m not certain that they take me very seriously. But the marriage of nature and spirit appears to be simmering just below the surface for many […]
There is no denying that the world could use a helping hand these days. With a shrinking ozone layer, melting ice caps and overfishing, the outlook for the environment isn’t so great. And knowing that all the penguins are moving to Hollywood only serves to remind us of how we’ve […]
ARE YOU A HYPOCRITE? Because I certainly am. I’m an animal lover who wears leather shoes; a vegetarian who can’t resist smoked salmon. I badger my friends to see the Al Gore movie, but I also fly on fuel-gulping jets. Great clouds of hypocrisy swirl around me. But even a […]
WITH AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH, March of the Penguins and The Day After Tomorrow grossing well over the average for a studio feature film, it seems that Hollywood may be listening. Moviegoers, adamant in their demands to mix pleasure with purpose, seem to no longer be content with films focused on […]
Art is powerful. Unlike science, which devotes itself to the refinement of analytical understanding, art has the capacity to go beyond hypothesis and fact to reveal something closer to emotional truth. Art can both explain the world around us, and inspire people to care about it.
Like the landscape it aims to preserve, the inherent power of This Soil, This Water comes from returning to and lingering- in its open spaces, nourishing colours and stoic wisdom. Environmental issues and controversies are certainly plentiful in 2012, but few books take aim with such subtle effectiveness, leaving room […]
