A Boeing 777 has approximately 150,000 subsystems, although under ideal conditions only a few hundred are needed. If it crashed, its 400 passengers and flight crew might perish. When Canada’s cod fishery collapsed, it put 40,000 people out of work, devastated a $500-million-per-year industry and killed countless fish. The US […]

Despite the Internet and the iPad, it’s hard to imagine that books will give way altogether. And as for environmental books, there are more than ever before on bookstore shelves. As Stephen Bocking points out in this issue of Alternatives, information is important, but stories are essential. That is exactly […]

Just as parents aren’t supposed to favour any one of their children, it’s risky for editors to have a special attachment to a particular issue of their magazine. Nonetheless, this other-worldly issue is very dear to our editor-in-chief. From space travel to crop circles, rainmakers to junk building, swamis to […]

Initially intended to celebrate our nation’s spectacular biodiversity in 2010, the UN International Year of Biodiversity, Alternatives Journal could not help but highlight Ottawa’s spectacular failure to value these invaluable ecosystems. At the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity in Nagoya, Japan, Canada may be blocking progress, rather than encouraging it.

Corn-based ethanol has become the latest target of the environmental and social justice movements, but let’s not throw out the jatropha, French-fry grease and pond scum with the maize. There is more to the biofuel debate than food-versus-fuel. Take a look inside this issue of Alternatives and you’ll discover that […]

20 books in review, 11 teasers, 2 excerpts, 3 essays, 13 staff favourites and 20 bestsellers. Featuring a whopping total of 77 new releases and timeless classics, our 2nd annual issue on environmental books is the ultimate guide to green reading.

Now on newsstands Is ecology the “master science” of the 21st century? Thomas Homer-Dixon argues that it could be society’s new dominant science, just as physics was in the 20th century. In this issue of Alternatives, we take a deep look at The New Ecology, with articles from Bill Rees, […]

Bill Rees says it best, “If you want sustainable cities, folks, they depend on sustainable countryside.” Yet the agricultural and natural lands that surround our urban centres are being systematically paved over and dug up to make way for housing, highways and industrial development.

This issue of Alternatives takes readers into a realm where the actions of government, corporations, citizens and middle institutions such as schools converge to transform society as we know it. It’s a place where the environment receives its due respect. Where, as peace activist Ursula Franklin suggested in a 1994 […]

Editorial: Reversing the Flow This issue of Alternatives focuses on water soft paths. For most people this statement invites the question: What are water soft paths? Though noun and adjective have been reversed, water soft paths share a common heritage with the soft energy paths developed in the 1970s by […]