Canada's Environmental Voice
Sad and grey: this is how I remember the Poland of the late 1980s and the early 90s. As a child, I felt overwhelmed by the depressing cityscapes and monotonous, boring design shaping the reality around me. Everything looked kind of the same: no originality, no uniqueness, no style – […]
IN 1982, Joe and Stephanie Mancini settled in Kitchener, Ontario, after a volunteer stint in Tanzania. The small city was faced with crippling unemployment as plant closings across North America wiped out many of the jobs that had supported thriving local economies. The young couple responded strongly to the disrupted […]
A\J’s Fashion issue explores the social and ecological impacts of “fast fashion.” In “Picking Up the Threads,” Kelly Drennan of Fashion Takes Action explains how low prices and über-trendiness come at the expense of both people and the environment.
A conversation between two characters highlights the main concerns in Thomas King’s new novel: the destruction of the environment and the stories told about these catastrophes. In response to Gabriel’s list of environmental disasters, Nicholas proclaims, “It’s well and proper to write what must be seen and to speak what […]
There is a longstanding consensus among the ecologically aware and the health conscious that beef is bad. At the site of production, cattle operations are widely understood to be resource-intensive and to have various negative outputs, including biological waste and plenty of carbon. At the site of consumption, we have […]
Our go-to style expert Isabel Slone presents a lineup of outfits and products that proves sustainability and style can go hand-in-hand. What makes these clothes sustainable? Slone prioritized natural materials, high quality, ethical labour and shopping at local businesses.
Jennifer Lynes is associate professor and director of the Environment and Business program at the University of Waterloo.
We can’t get enough fast fashion. Globally, we consume more than 80 billion pieces of clothing each year, many of them hyper-trendy, low-cost items that move from runway to sale rack at breakneck speed. Fashion is a trillion-dollar-a-year industry that increasingly relies on rock-bottom retail prices. The amount of made-in-Canada […]
Jessie O’Driscoll is a recent graduate from the Environment and Business program at the University of Waterloo.
SWIMBYISM: {swīm-bi: izem} It’s a new word I just learned and it stands for “something wonderful in my backyard.” It also perfectly describes a movement of relocalizing fibres and textiles in regional communities that is gaining interest in North America and Europe – it’s called Fibreshed, and it’s dramatically changing […]
