Canada's Environmental Voice
WHAT A LOVELY BOOM it was to be. Earth Day 1970 was a recent memory, and then president Richard Nixon was expanding American involvement in Vietnam. But for many, the action was in Northern Canada. It was full speed ahead for frontier oil and gas. Oil wells would be pumping, […]
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 […]
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 […]
IS IT JUST my impression, or has there been a spate of nature and environment-related documentaries recently?
Pear Tree Bottom in Runaway Bay, Jamaica is a haven for local residents, a habitat for coral, and the north coast’s last wetland. It’s also a target for international hotel developers. After joining the battle to protect the land, Marie Dixon Frisch says the political, legal and emotional conflicts were […]
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,
WITH AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH, March of the Penguins and The Day After Tomorrow grossing well over the average for a studio feature film, it seems that Hollywood may be listening. Moviegoers, adamant in their demands to mix pleasure with purpose, seem to no longer be content with films focused on […]
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 […]
