Canada's Environmental Voice
DROUGHT CAN BE SCARY, and there’s no doubt that recent headlines about the potentially cataclysmic drought in California has us all a little uneasy. Groundwater has long been California’s “safety net” in times of drought, but so much groundwater has been taken that land is sinking under people’s feet, and […]
For a self-dubbed Minister of Youth, Justin Trudeau has yet to really impress the Canadian Youth Delegation (CYD) at UN climate negotiations in Paris. 17 young Canadians are in Paris trying to have their voices heard by the government and negotiators. In the first week of the conference, the CYD […]
Inside Petit Palais in Paris, activists, artists, politicians, science and tech companies gathered to send a love letter from Earth to Paris. In the months before the start of COP21, Max Schorr, co-founder of GOOD, started bringing organizations, which would end up at 111, together to create a coalition to ensure […]
It is easier to adjust human created rules than it is to override the laws of nature. Canadian journalist and activist Naomi Klein borrowed a set of that piece of Julius Caesar wisdom when developing the Leap Manifesto, which launched last September. Caesar meant it in the context of adding […]
In their endorsement of Demystifying Sustainability, Paul and Anne Ehrlich state, “Sustainability may be the most important … and most misused word in our language. This brilliant, deep, accurate, well-referenced book should do wonders to rectify that. It should be required reading for every high-school student, CEO and politician.” I would also […]
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 […]
Initiated at a two-day meeting last spring, the manifesto calls on Canada’s government to address issues facing our country today ranging from indigenous rights to increasing poverty to rampant inequality. However, the over-arching theme of the fifteen demands is of environmental stewardship as a means to combat our greatest threat, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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.
