Canada's Environmental Voice
This issue of Alternatives focuses on water soft paths. For most people this statement invites the question: What are water soft paths? Though noun and adjective have been reversed, water soft paths share a common heritage with the soft energy paths developed in the 1970s by a group of researchers […]
Richard Gilbert opens Waste is what we have used and have no further use for. Incinerating waste, I believe, is a better environmental solution than landfilling.
SIMPLE SOLUTIONS to difficult problems are exceedingly rare. Their attraction, however, is undeniable. The world is awash in cults, fanaticisms and miracle cures. Millions of media minutes are devoted to how we can stop climate change by dumping iron filings in the ocean, prevent cancer by taking massive doses of […]
WE ARE SURROUNDED by a sea of discarded materials that can be reused in building construction. Think of all those political signboards that we see at election time outside private houses and in other prominent locations. Temporary signs are often made of corrugated plastic that could be used as siding […]
IT’S 2060. Your grandchildren are sitting in their classroom. On the wall hangs a photograph of a blue planet. But it isn’t Earth. It’s a planet in a distant star system. And we know that this planet harbours life. Humanity is not alone. Now imagine a different scenario. Suppose our […]
LISTEN TO the full 45-minute interview with Buzz Holling on our Podcast page. Nicola Ross: You’ve written that “Novelty emerges from the interaction between opportunity and crisis.” Can you explain what you mean by novelty?
I HAVE NEVER gone south in the winter. The closest I came was a three-day, mid-February family getaway in Niagara Falls at a hotel with an indoor waterslide park. The chlorine infusion did wonders for my skin! I actually prefer going to Ottawa to skate on the canal or ski […]
THIS YEAR MARKED a new rise in concern about the global impacts of climate change, prompted, no doubt, by the release of former US vice president Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth. We’ve compiled a list of mostly Canadian noteworthy climate change reports, legislation and summaries published in 2006. International […]
Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art,
WHAT THE WARMING WORLD needs now,” writes author Bill McKibben in Grist magazine, “is art, sweet art.” Precisely because environmental problems are rooted in cultural practices and ideologies, it is artists, immersed in world and cultural practices, who are ideally situated to locate and develop effective- responses. In fact, we’ve […]
