Canada's Environmental Voice
In The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, the feel-good travel epic released last Christmas, Ben Stiller plays a compulsive daydreamer who travels around the world in search of a missing photograph. Mitty’s hunt for the photograph allows him to escape his boring life working in a darkened photo lab at […]
Papermaking remains a thriving industry in parts of the non-Western world including India, Nepal and Egypt. In many of these locales there are efforts in place to maintain handmade paper as a viable local industry for both economic and cultural reasons. Handmade paper also often relies on local organic materials […]
With the May long weekend signalling the arrival of summer, I wasted no time leaving behind Toronto for the quiet solitude of Algonquin Provincial Park. Hiking amongst 400-year-old trees, sighting rare birds, stopping on the highway to spot moose and enjoying the call of loons on the lake helps you […]
In the future, the pragmatic goals of survival, balance and sustainability will govern all design decisions, either by regulation or to remain competitive and win clients and commissions. It is within this climate of calculated trade-offs that the design of the expanded Fort McMurray airport by Vancouver’s Office of McFarlane […]
One of the organizations listing in our sharing directory is The Working Centre, located around the corner from our office in downtown Kitchener. They were so excited about our Sharing issue that they offered to share more details about the work they do – read on and get inspired!
Barry Orr, spokesperson for the Municipal Enforcement Sewer Use Group (MESUG) and sewer compliance officer for the City of London, ON, would like us all to understand that “toilets are not garbage cans.” In a blog post for Water Canada, he says that material such as dental floss, diapers, candy […]
Within today’s instantaneously disposable culture, buildings are often thoughtlessly constructed using mass-produced curtain wall and structural systems while capitalizing on consumers’ fleeting needs for ephemerality and ambiguity of space and place. Given the demands of the marketplace, how and why would anyone ever design an architectural program based on localized […]
Sharing is about maximizing the use of products, services and ideas in order to minimize overall consumption by a community. This principle has a surprising number of applications – people can and do share just about anything. It’s also nothing new; sharing books, movies, equipment and hand-me-downs has been common […]
For nearly five years, Sustainable Waterloo Region (SWR) has been convincing companies and organizations around Kitchener, Waterloo and Cambridge, Ontario, to instigate a cultural shift that would help sew environmental responsibility into the way Canada’s 10th most populated urban area grows and evolves.
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 […]
