Canada's Environmental Voice
One of North America’s largest conservation areas sits on the suburban fringe of Canada’s largest metropolis, home to more than five million people. The Oak Ridges Moraine spans 190,000 hectares of forests, wetlands, lakes and prairies north of the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), but it has been conceptualized as a […]
Last week, our How To lesson was about canning, and this week we’ve also posted some rad reviews of food-related books: Digging the City: An Urban Agriculture Manifesto and Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Foo
Huge supermarket chains appear to be bursting at the seams with food choices, but this is mostly an illusion. The reality is that 75 per cent of our crop biodiversity has been lost. Our industrial food system has created too many overweight, undernourished citizens. The environmental degradation caused by multinational-scale […]
“What hath night to do with sleep?” proclaimed John Milton in Paradise Lost. Environmental activists, I think, would agree that sleep has very little to do with it because night is not a time for rest but for action. It provides a cloak of invisibility under which they can enact […]
THE DEBATE about the Keystone XL pipeline has dragged on for more than five years now, and it is beginning to look like a petroleum-fuelled version of the Napoleonic Wars. On one side, Big Oil and its revenue-hungry government allies want to maintain the Napoleonic status quo by expanding an aging […]
AFTER ABOUT FIVE MINUTES in darkness, our eyes become up to 30 times more sensitive than they are to bright light. After about a half hour, they become 100,000 times as sensitive.
A community in Ontario’s heartland is at the centre of a David vs. Goliath legal fight to protect its water. Since 1988, Nestlé has been withdrawing water from a deep aquifer well in Hillsburgh, Wellington County, Ontario. Currently the company pays only $3.71 for every million litres that it removes […]
LOCAL FOOD HAS TAKEN OFF. From coast to coast to coast, the Canadian food landscape is changing. Within local communities, alternatives to entrenched supply-chain strategies are thriving, such as farmers’ markets, restaurants that focus on regional food sources, community supported agriculture (CSA), farm-gate sales and certified organic food production. Increasingly, Canadians […]
On Sunday, I flew back to Kitchener, Ontario, after spending a little more than a week in Calgary. I’m not yet sure of the words I want to use to describe the Great Flood of 2013. I wish I could have stayed longer to assemble a bigger pile, to gather […]
Hidden Harvest Ottawa was founded in 2012 to help reduce the amount of food going to waste from untended public fruit trees around the city. Read more about it in Concrete Orchard in the Art & Media issue.
