Canada's Environmental Voice
Banking heavily on a belief that you and I are preoccupied with fighting climate change, the front-runners in the federal election have anchored their environmental platforms to the way in which they’ll tackle greenhouse gases: cap-and-trade, carbon taxes, vague promises of low-carbon economies. While New Democrats and Liberals attempt to […]
Business will be the force that drives society’s transformation to a low-carbon economy. With limited involvement from the business sector so far, our progress has been inadequate. Yet, of the world’s largest 100 economic entities, 40 are corporations, and they generated over $7.9-trillion (US) in 2012, giving them – rightly or […]
Chris Winter has spent two years rethinking our approach to sustainability: a year of research and introspection, and a year of world travel and learning with his family. Two years of reflection, experience, and percolation, and this is what he has found. LIFE IS DEFINED through success and failure, often […]
The “age of ecology” dawned at the end of the 1960s. Cold-war fears of nuclear fallout, warnings of a pesticide-laden silent spring and rivers so polluted they caught fire drove new attention to the environment. The first Earth Day was celebrated in 1970. The US created its Environmental Protection Agency […]
Most environmentalists are familiar with the so-called “tragedy of the commons.” In 1968, Garrett Hardin popularized the idea in Science as a way to understand environmental deterioration of common-pool resources.
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 […]
In his brief career, Phil Ochs wrote over 100 songs – many of them about civil rights and other caring social/environmental observations. “When I’m Gone” was just one of his many anthems pointing toward a better world. From a songwriting standpoint, Elephant Revival does not appear to be influenced by Ochs’ music, […]
Why does Canada hate Indigenous rights? Or, more properly, why has the government campaigned so hard to subdue the right to Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC), even when it’s now enshrined in a UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP)? The specific right to FPIC, as it […]
On June 18, Pope Francis released a 180-page encyclical letter on the environment, addressed to every person on the planet. He covers a lot of ground: pollution, our throwaway culture, the breakdown of society. Here are the passages that particularly resonate with A\J.
Andrew Welch has a thing about numbers. He loves them. But as he gradually began to see the connection between growing, multiple global crises and the lack of awareness surrounding the day-to-day human behaviour that produces them, he began to wonder if humanity’s over-reliance on numbers was responsible. “We use […]
