Canada's Environmental Voice
Having been millions of years in development, the life forms that thrive on Earth have come up with a trick or two for maximizing sustainability. So what better model could we use for sustainable technology than the Earth’s own natural processes? And one of the most impressive of the world’s […]
Powering the world entirely through renewable energies is going to bring about some logistical challenges, as technological change always does.
This suite of eight-foot by eight-foot paintings by Ottawa-based painter Stephen Hutchings is a character study of storms, each as distinct as a snowflake. “The Tower” is fierce and concentrated, capturing a tornado column as it violently strikes an idyllic green field. “Gathering Storm” is ominous and foreboding, with its swirl […]
Medicine Hat, Alberta, is branching out. The city has approved a proposal to install the country’s first concentrated solar power (CSP) project. CSP typically employs an array of mirrors to reflect sunlight onto a single point, often at the top of a central tower. The concentrated light quickly becomes heat, […]
The boreal forest is essential to the survival of life on earth. It is often referred to as “the lungs of the planet” because of the critical role it plays in air purification and carbon capture. But did you know that the boreal forest is also crucial to local and […]
This index cites only one publication year for those titles that have multiple editions. *Refers to a book that has been reviewed in this issue. An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It, Al Gore, Emmaus, PA: Rodale Books, 2006, 328 pages. […]
AT OUR HOUSE, Alternatives is a keeper; as with great cookbooks, we mark up our favourite articles and save them for future reference. I also keep Orion’s gorgeous photos and impassioned essays, and together, the sumptuous American magazine and its savvy northern cousin keep my family on a balanced diet […]
CANADIAN BOOK-BUYING choices changed direction in 2008. In our informal survey of independent bookstores across the country, we learned that sales of environmental books weren’t down like the stock market, but they were different from last year.
I’VE BEEN THINKING a lot about Sudbury these days. Long the butt of moonscape jokes and widely recognized as one of the world’s “best” examples of industrial pollution, this Northern Ontario town has much to teach us about hope and moving ahead. By the 1970s, after decades of exposure to […]
AT A CLIMATE change conference in Vancouver in 1996, I ran into David Suzuki. He wasn’t well versed on the issue back then and wanted to know if there were any companies doing something about climate- change. I named a few and he suggested that it would be a good […]
