Canada's Environmental Voice
This quietly jarring documentary about National Geographic photographer James Balog’s work explores the challenge of bringing climate change into focus. In search of a seductive, meaningful display of global warming’s impact, Balog realized “the story is in the ice, somehow,” and created the Extreme Ice Survey (extremeicesurvey.org) in 2005.
SINCE ROMAN PLEBEIANS rose up against their masters in the fifth century BCE, social movements have been the most important force for advancing progressive change. They work because ordinary people – like you and me – are the ultimate source of power in any society: People in positions of economic, […]
WHEN BJÖRK CRITICIZED Magma Energy Corp. chairman and CEO Ross Beaty in an interview with Maclean’s in November 2010, the Icelandic pop singer couldn’t have struck a deeper chord. Maclean’s subsequently pulled the interview from the internet after Magma threatened the Canadian magazine with a libel suit.
LAST JUNE, I returned to Banff National Park after a long absence. It was good to be back. Banff, Canada’s first and most famous national park, is an important part of my home range. My daughter was born in Banff ’s Mineral Springs Hospital, her birth witnessed by a herd […]
It’s About My Perverse City Book Re: Ray Tomalty’s review of Perverse Cities: Hidden Subsidies, Wonky Policy and Urban Sprawl, Alternatives, 37:6.
WHEN THE FIRST ISSUE of Alternatives Journal rolled off the presses in 1971, the world was a very different place – politically and technologically. There was a self-conscious political left and the political right was far less ascendant. Computers filled whole rooms and munched on punch cards to obtain information. […]
BACK IN 1971, the founders of this publication called it Alternatives. Bob Paehlke, who played a big role in the conception, says the idea was to explore better options for a blindly pro-consumption and pro-growth-at-all-costs society in which almost no one was thinking about the long term.
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 […]
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.
