Canada's Environmental Voice
OVER CHRISTMAS, I used my recently learned Spanish. Each time I understood a taxi driver or shopkeeper, I felt a great sense of awe. What once seemed to be a jumble of indistinguishable sounds had sub-divided into individual words. It was as if a microscope in my brain were able […]
FOR BOOK READERS, it’s unimaginable that anyone would not get a rush when they crack open the pages of a new volume, inhale that inky smell and feel the crisp paper. In a small village close to where I live, there’s a publisher who prints on site. Tim Inkster, co-owner […]
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 […]
ARE YOU A HYPOCRITE? Because I certainly am. I’m an animal lover who wears leather shoes; a vegetarian who can’t resist smoked salmon. I badger my friends to see the Al Gore movie, but I also fly on fuel-gulping jets. Great clouds of hypocrisy swirl around me. But even a […]
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 […]
LAUNCHING STREET FESTIVALS. Planting watermelon. Doling out fake traffic tickets. If you’re wondering what these have in common, read on. They’re ingenious ways of handling issues, prying open the box. That’s what Alternatives delivers in this Creative Communities issue: fresh approaches to entrenched social problems – poverty, waste, addiction, environmental […]
IN 2005, Andrea Dawber came across a project named Walk Here. She recalls thinking about Davenport, the tree-challenged Toronto community where she lives: It needs to be green here, she realized, if people are going to walk here. And so began GreenHere, the 2010 winner of Earth Day Canada’s Hometown […]
HEATHER MACFADYEN relates her horror upon returning to her weekend home in Canmore, Alberta, after a six-week hiatus. “I was driving along the road that leads to our place when I realized that something was missing. What had been a mature lodgepole pine forest a few short weeks ago was […]
A RADICAL TRANSFORMATION of education would develop an ecologically literate society – one that understands the principles of ecological systems and uses them to design human systems.
