Canada's Environmental Voice
Right now, we live in a world that is an average of 0.8 degrees (Celcius) warmer than it was one hundred years ago. This is a profoundly changed planet: one of superstorms, species loss, rising ocean levels, and innumerable other environmental catastrophes.
IN THE MID 1908s, I was involved in one of those touchy-feely weekend retreats along with individuals from Alberta’s Energy Resources Conservation Board (ERCB). Among other things, we completed the Myers-Briggs personality test.
Canada largely owes its economic development to natural resources, the vast and (theoretically) sustainable resources like lumber, fish, minerals, agriculture and energy in the form of oil and natural gas. Borrowing liberally from Harold Innis’s iconic The Fur Trade in Canada, hewers of wood and drawers of water we were, […]
Kapuskasing mayor Alan Spacek is optimistic that an October 18 meeting between Northern Ontario’s mayors and Natural Resources Minister Michael Gravelle will lead to changes in the government’s decision to reduce services in 10 provincial parks. The group presented a report to the minister that compiled park usage data from […]
On October 11 in Lake Louise, Alberta, a game-changing deal was signed by the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment (CCME) to regulate air pollution. Although it received very little media attention, the Air Quality Management System (AQMS) is an impressive agreement that finally addresses the division of […]
The Maine coast is a wicked scene, as abruptly harsh as it is serene. It is foreboding and kind, majestic and dull. It is here that two young eccentrics chose to retreat – almost totally – in hopes that homesteading on their very own island might afford more than society […]
In June, Ontario’s Minister of the Environment stood at the shoreline of Lake Ontario in downtown Toronto to announce the introduction of Bill 100, the Great Lakes Protection Act, 2012. This broad new legislation would allow ministries to better cooperate on conservation initiatives – water quality, wastewater treatment, algae blooms, […]
YOU’VE PROBABLY NEVER heard of Fred Cottrell, and that’s a shame. The American sociologist wrote an idea-busting book in 1955, Energy and Society, in which he argued that the availability of energy set and erased the limits of what human beings can do. He revised the essay in 1972, seven years […]
IN THE COLDEST NIGHT of the season, well below freezing, and the tawny grasses are stiff with frost. Since dawn we’ve been trekking through a shadowy forest of pine and fir, eventually reaching a wide, arched meadow with views extending to the south and west. Ts’yl?os [pronounced, Ts-eye´-los], sacred mountain […]
WHEN GORDIE WORNOFF finds a broken aluminum ladder on the roadside, he turns it into table or chair legs. He’d use a discarded pine futon to make a window or molding. In a grocer’s garbage, he could probably find something for his next meal.
