SUSTAINABLE LIFE

What’s the Big Idea? Markets

EVERY SUMMER, we have a small produce market in our neighbourhood. Volunteers run it oncea week. In the morning, they go to the regional farmers’ produce auction. In the afternoon, they set out the fruits and vegetables on temporary tables in front of the community centre, with handmade signs indicating […]

Sustaining Change from the Middle Ground

“Climate porn.” That’s how the Institute for Public Policy Research in Britain depicts the portrayal of the climate crisis by media and governments. In the organization’s report, “Warm Words,” the authors claim the apocalyptic and external framing of global warming convinces the public that climate change is inevitable and therefore […]

Coal Power Plant. Alternatives Journal.

Coal, Oil & Cancer

VOWS OF MARRIAGE. Oaths of citizenship. A jury’s verdict. Words with the power to change our identities are usually spoken in public places. But a cancer diagnosis is almost always delivered within a private conversation that takes place, unwitnessed, behind the closed door of a doctor’s office, on the phone, […]

EcoMorphosis

WHEN THE FIRST ISSUE of Alternatives Journal rolled off the presses in 1971, the world was a very different place – politically and technologically. There was a self-conscious political left and the political right was far less ascendant. Computers filled whole rooms and munched on punch cards to obtain information. […]

Editorial: What Makes a Building Green

AS THE ALTERNATIVES TEAM was finishing up this Green Buildings issue, we were also settling in to a new building ourselves. The former Public Utilities Building in the heart of downtown Kitchener, Ontario, is a three-storey stone beauty from the early 1930s, complete with Art Deco flourishes and an original […]

Eating Up

THE QUESTION made a great conversation starter on its own: Can a grand dinner party bringing together the right people spark a conversation that could change the world? Last November, World Accord International Development Agency in Waterloo, Ontario, decided to find out.