Canada's Environmental Voice
The Neptis Foundation is well known for its research reports on land use and transportation issues in the Toronto region. It is one of the few outfits currently publishing material at a regional scale of analysis in Canada. So when Neptis releases a new report, it’s a bit of an […]
Imagine a society in which the figures, facts and records that governments accumulate are publicly available and free to use by citizens, civil society and business. This – and the potential for greater civic involvement in politics it promises – is what the open data movement wants to see, and […]
There’s no doubt that our economy has been built upon acquisitiveness. Since the Second World War, incessant growth has been based on mass production; mass production has been based on creating and channeling demand; and demand has been based on the desire to have or own. We are trained from […]
Around the year 2000, I attended a conference organized by the Council of Canadians about the risks associated with genetically modified organisms. At some point during the proceedings, an extraordinary thing happened. One of the speakers, professor Ann Clark (then of Guelph University) rose and said the following: the problem […]
Ontario’s Environmental Commissioner Gord Miller is warning Queen’s Park could face sharp reprimands by the courts for its failure to uphold wildlife protections under the Endangered Species Act.
Kim Ondaatje’s current exhibition at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, ON surveys a career spanning over fifty years, and in doing so, serves to entrench the artist within the canon of the Canadian landscape tradition.
Canoeing matters because it can illustrate the mobilization of power and politics through nature, nation, and leisure. The stories told about the canoe, stories related to its iconic status for the nation, need to be understood as moments in the ever-contested field of cultural politics. Thinking critically about the canoe […]
In A\J’s Heroes issue Laura McDonald put Prime Minister Harper on trial for ecocide. Scientists and other commentators are also accusing Harper of ‘libricide’ for the wholesale massacre of numerous world-class federal libraries. The activity has been characterized as a frenzy of knowledge destruction without regard for record keeping or […]
Toronto has a seemingly neverending cycle of film festivals, but only Planet in Focus trains its crosshairs exclusively on environmental concerns. The 14th annual version (from November 21 to 24) featured a slate of strong, complex and curious documentaries, and another handful of very well deserved PiF award winners.
The glaring fluorescence of Atlantic Superstore lights must have blinded me. How could I buy a shiny, temptingly red – and cheap – Mexican tomato when I knew I could purchase local, organic ones at the Halifax Farmers’ Market? Why did I do it? What possessed me to buy outside […]
