Canada's Environmental Voice
Sharks are the perfect predator – formed by 450 million years of evolution having lived longer than the dinosaurs and surviving five major extinctions. They formed life as we know it and keep the oceans, our planet’s life force, healthy. We exist, in part, because sharks did – and still […]
There’s an ethereal quality to much nature writing that can feel oppressively twee, miscalibrated to life in the Anthropocene. Annie Dillard may have had a year to wander the Blue Ridge Mountains playing King of the Meadow with grasshoppers, but that was 1974. Haven’t you heard? A Delaware-sized iceberg is […]
Imagine catching a GO train to see, taste, and pick the best the world grows and prepares all in one place. Imagine picking your own berries and then drinking squeezed juice while watching some frisky goats. Then imagine sitting down to enjoy what can be done with the cheese they […]
A roving pack of journalists shake off the rain in a squat, one-story federal building in Oak Harbor, Ohio. Hosting us journalists is a troop from the US Department of Agriculture. Beyond working with farmers, most are farmers themselves. But unlike many of their agricultural colleagues, these men embrace the kind […]
The blooms returned in 2002. Many hoped the toxic sludge of algae that blanketed the western and central basins of Lake Erie was gone for good, yet the volume of smothering plant matter was growing steadily. Summers from 2008 to 2010 were bloom-heavy in the shallowest of the Great Lakes. […]
Shrinking snowpack, receding glaciers, clear cut logging, fossil fuel extraction and off road vehicle use are all exerting enormous pressures on our precious water resources. Van Tighems’ latest book, Heart Waters – Sources of the Bow River examines these pressures from both a historical and scientific perspective and explores the root […]
DROUGHT CAN BE SCARY, and there’s no doubt that recent headlines about the potentially cataclysmic drought in California has us all a little uneasy. Groundwater has long been California’s “safety net” in times of drought, but so much groundwater has been taken that land is sinking under people’s feet, and […]
Over the years, protection of Canada’s fresh water has largely been deferred to provincial and territorial governments.
I don’t mean to shock you, but First Nations people in Canada were only granted the right to vote in 1960. That’s still within living memory, and a constant reminder of how far this country has gone to silence the voice of this country’s founding peoples.
Naïve? Perhaps it was, but 15 years ago the public perception was that Canadians don’t die from drinking tap water. We certainly don’t die from drinking water from a municipal supply in Southwestern Ontario. So when the small town of Walkerton found its drinking water supply contaminated over the course […]
