Canada's Environmental Voice
Being an environmentalist isn’t for sissies – the statistics are depressing and they turn people off, and the problems often seem to have no end. Anyone feeling this way should read The Transition Companion, which mixes knowledge, action and inspiration to address a range of areas that are central to […]
“Shifting our behaviour to achieve sustainability depends on society’s ability to reconnect with nature,” writes Brendon Larson. In his first solo-authored book, Metaphors for Environmental Sustainability, Larson, who teaches in the Environment and Resource Studies program at the University of Waterloo and is president of Ontario Nature, encourages his readers […]
Humanizing the Economy describes an alternative economic system and accompanies it with examples of how such a system is being built around the world. Beginning with a critique of capitalism, author John Restakis argues that before the emergence of this economic order, market transactions were embedded in social relations that […]
Good photographs and good poetry have a great deal in common: They both offer lessons in seeing, placing their audience as if behind the lens or the pen, opening them to the world in a way not before realized. Catherine Owen’s book of poetry, Seeing Lessons, demonstrates the power of […]
There is no denying the unique vantage point of Timothy Leduc’s new book, Climate, Culture, Change: Inuit and Western Dialogues with a Warming North. Your first clue is right there in the subtitle: that’s dialogues with, not about, Canada’s northern ecology.
Apart from a knowledgeable mentor, the field guide is a nature enthusiast’s most valuable tool. With the right guide, a seemingly featureless swath of unfamiliar habitat comes alive with ecological insight. In ornithology, guides are particularly valuable due to the immense variability that birds display. In The Crossley ID Guide: […]
Fashion is one of the most profitable industries in the world, but we rarely hear about the ugly practices used to keep beauty in business. For instance, the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan has diminished by 90 per cent, partially due to the irrigation of cotton crops for the textile industry […]
Here on Earth: A Natural History of the Planet is as much a personal letter to humanity as a natural history of the planet. It asks, “Will ours be a Medean or Gaian future?”, referring to diverging hypotheses named for Greek goddesses, one destructive and the other life-giving.
The title of John Michael Greer’s The Wealth of Nature: Economics as if Survival Mattered contains references to two very different economic works: Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. He calls on both books in his attempt to demonstrate that contemporary economics has gone […]
We live in an age of monumental folly when it comes to the environment. The folly is running along two different and equally worrisome tracks. First, there is the destruction of the natural world, our outer environment. It is typified by the looming failure to deal with global warming, a […]
