Canada's Environmental Voice
A FROZEN-GROUND BARRIER may sound more like a sci-fi set piece than a modern remediation technology. Unlike a wall above ground, ice walls — or ice dykes, curtains, ring-fences and cofferdams — exist below ground and are a separate entity from the surrounding soil and groundwater. Ground freezing is widely […]
YOU’VE HEARD the ads. Beyond the ugly open pit mines lies a different sort of oil sands, intones a friendly Cenovus voice. The difference, goes the ad, consists of some 100 gleaming steam plants in Alberta’s boreal forest where industry can safely recover oil from 450 metres beneath the ground […]
Justice Anne Mactavish ruled in February that the federal ministers of both the environment and fisheries have broken the law under the Species at Risk Act (SARA).
TECHNICALLY, only plants can be weeds. But plenty of other organisms are similarly vigorous, adaptive to circumstances and resilient in the face of discouragement. They, or rather we, are metaphorical weeds. Weeds in the plant world thrive in adversity. Unwanted, maligned and attacked with murderous intent, they nonetheless survive and […]
The movie Selma was released earlier this month to widespread critical acclaim. While the film is beautifully made and relatively true to the history it is based on, there’s another achievement that most people overlook in the film.
THERE’S A PARK that stretches through the heart of downtown Toronto’s west side from the Lake Ontario shoreline to the congested corner of Bloor and Bathurst streets. You can’t really see it from that intersection, and its five kilometres don’t register as green space on Google maps.
As two friends and I drove home from David Suzuki’s Blue Dot Tour this Fall, we wondered aloud if our critical views were sacrilegious. At the very least we felt un-Canadian. As we contemplated this, a lightning bolt shot down in front of us. No kidding. It’s not that we […]
The Mingan Archipelago National Park lies on a lonely stretch of coast in the northeast corner of North America. Nearly five centuries have passed since Jacques Cartier first laid anchor nearby, when the Atlantic coast teemed with wildlife. The landscape remains unmarred by the signatures of modern life, though the […]
The Harper government strives mightily to get more of Canada’s economic eggs into one oily basket. They seem unable to imagine a future based on things other than what we can dig up from the ground and the means of moving those things around.
