Canada's Environmental Voice
Editorial: Back to the Future In the 1970s the Middle East was in crisis and most Canadians thought and talked about energy use, especially after oil prices quadrupled in 1979. Big station wagons and tail-finned behemoths became yesterday’s vehicles. Thirty years later, the Middle East is in a crisis not […]
FOR CENTURIES, seahorses have held our curiosity. They appear in scrolls from ancient Greece and seaside tales from the Victorian era. The seahorse form even appears in the folds of our brains, in the shape of the hippocampus – the component of our limbic system responsible for consolidating memories and for […]
In the August/September issue of A\J [38:5, In Defence of Science], energy reporter Andrew Nikiforuk wrote a column that rubbed a number of our readers the wrong way. The executive directors of Environmental Defence and the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment responded with a joint letter that picked […]
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 […]
THE GREAT ECOLOGIST Garrett Hardin once noted that in any endeavor, “We can never do merely one thing.” The great wind power boom ably proves his point.
WHILE 100-MILE DIETERS provide a ray of hope, small-scale farmers the world over continue to face intense pressures, and many are still forced out of farming each year. In response, we need to think carefully about our aspirations for the 21st century food system.
You’ve heard it before – small is beautiful. Whether it’s farming, mining or producing energy, the size of the operation is important. Despite the welcome trend toward smaller scale production, however, it isn’t always the best solution. In this edition of Alternatives Journal , we look at the issue of […]
AH, THE NEW YEAR. Time to change the wall calendar. By October, our household had already acquired Greenpeace’s latest offering, a Group of Seven issue, and one of those generic versions that hardware stores and real estate agents give out for free. All of them feature beautiful scenes of pristine […]
IN ITS QUEST to dominate the planet’s agricultural biotechnology sector, Monsanto’s business model has produced significant collateral damage. Generations of farming families in South America, India and other robustly developing regions have been devastated by the US-based multinational’s product line, namely its flagship herbicide Roundup and the patented seeds that […]
Read the first half of the interview that was published in In Defence of Science. Stephen Bocking: Would you say that this is the most critical period in environmental protection, at least going back to the 1960s?
