Canada's Environmental Voice
Banking heavily on a belief that you and I are preoccupied with fighting climate change, the front-runners in the federal election have anchored their environmental platforms to the way in which they’ll tackle greenhouse gases: cap-and-trade, carbon taxes, vague promises of low-carbon economies. While New Democrats and Liberals attempt to […]
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, […]
When Robert and Brenda Vale published Time to Eat the Dog? The Real Guide to Sustainable Living in 2009, dog blogs lit up in fury. The authors had crunched the numbers and reported that a medium-sized dog has twice the climate impact of driving a gas-guzzling car 16,000 kilometres – […]
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 […]
Why does Canada hate Indigenous rights? Or, more properly, why has the government campaigned so hard to subdue the right to Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC), even when it’s now enshrined in a UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP)? The specific right to FPIC, as it […]
There is a longstanding consensus among the ecologically aware and the health conscious that beef is bad. At the site of production, cattle operations are widely understood to be resource-intensive and to have various negative outputs, including biological waste and plenty of carbon. At the site of consumption, we have […]
For years now, greens have touted electric cars as a cardinal solution to the world’s problems. Electric vehicles would not only lower carbon emissions, but also make our cities quieter and cleaner places. But hardcore science has always had some trouble with this pleasant illusion, given all the energy and […]
Constructing unique world-class competition facilities for multisport events often leaves behind overbuilt, expensive and underused relics. With this harsh reality in mind, organizers for this summer’s Pan Am and Parapan Am Games in Toronto are taking lessons from other host cities to develop best practices for infrastructure design and construction […]
EACH WEEK, A\J staffers share our favourite facts & findings from whatever books, articles, documentaries, podcasts and other media we’ve been consuming. Here’s what we’ve learned this week!
Raw Cotton Demand: ~26.0 million tonnesWater use: Up to 3860** litres/kgEnergy use: 50 MJ/kg Pesticides or chemicalsHeavy pesticide use leads to reduced soil fertility, loss of biodiversity and water pollution. Effluent/pollution from manufacturingEcosystem contamination from pollutants in runoff. Toxic wastewater from manufacturing process (e.g., cleaning, dyeing).*
