Canada's Environmental Voice
AS WE CROSSOVER the Claiborne Avenue bridge from the Upper Ninth Ward on Gray Line International’s “Hurricane Katrina – America’s Greatest Catastrophe” tour, local artist Brad Dupuy informs us in his rich voice that we “are about to enter what is known famously as the Lower Ninth Ward.” What makes […]
PRETEND THAT YOU are about to build a modest home somewhere in Canada. You’ve made the appropriate arrangements with designers, building officials, contractors and suppliers. The only thing left to do before you start construction is order the 75,000-litre railway tanker full of gasoline that you’ll burn to provide the […]
Chris Wood, is an author, speaker and journalist. He first wrote about the environment in the 1970s, winning awards for his coverage of nuclear power and agrochemicals. His most recent book, Down the Drain: How We Are Failing to Protect Our Water Resources (2013), written with Ralph Pentland, details how successive federal governments […]
RON PORTELLI RECALLS when his university-bound daughter asked him where she should study environmental science. Despite a long environmental career, Portelli was surprised to realize he didn’t know the answer. Such was the separation between universities and the environment industry.
If Herman Daly is the economist for sustainable development, Amory Lovins the physicist and Al Gore the politician, William Ophuls must be the philosopher. Ophuls’ first book on the subject, Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity (1997), placed him among the few scholars of the time (Rifkin and Daly in […]
When reviewing a book, I mark it up mercilessly. I jot down notable points, create a list of possible quotes and scribble down potential themes that might shape my review. When my lists are long, jumbled and written in my fast, furious – and almost illegible – handwriting, it means […]
“At some point, someone in America is going to have to make something.” These obvious yet perhaps revolutionary words come from Industrial Evolution, a wonderful new book by Lyle Estill, an entrepreneur, author, and, dare I say, environmental industrialist. The book’s premise reflects something that we all know but generally […]
Have you ever struggled to reconcile difficult questions about climate change? Are you faced with naysayers who claim that the human impact on the biosphere is all a media fabrication or the workings of scheming Birkenstock-wearing extremists? Authored by a father-son team (a professor at Duke University and an attorney […]
The title of John Michael Greer’s The Wealth of Nature: Economics as if Survival Mattered contains references to two very different economic works: Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. He calls on both books in his attempt to demonstrate that contemporary economics has gone […]
We live in an age of monumental folly when it comes to the environment. The folly is running along two different and equally worrisome tracks. First, there is the destruction of the natural world, our outer environment. It is typified by the looming failure to deal with global warming, a […]
