Canada's Environmental Voice
RECENTLY LAUDED by the CBC as one of Anna Maria Tremonti’s “Game Changers,” Nicole Rycroft has been on an impassioned journey. Originally from Australia, this stalwart activist for environmental rights has gone from practising direct-action in blockades to sharing boardrooms with CEOs from some of Canada’s largest paper-consuming businesses.
Interested in convincing yourself and those around you to live sustainably? Here are three books that can help you try. In The Power of Sustainable Thinking, Bob Doppelt emphasizes the change process that he believes will lead us to sustainability. Although he sees this book as a complement to his […]
Good photographs and good poetry have a great deal in common: They both offer lessons in seeing, placing their audience as if behind the lens or the pen, opening them to the world in a way not before realized. Catherine Owen’s book of poetry, Seeing Lessons, demonstrates the power of […]
Here on Earth: A Natural History of the Planet is as much a personal letter to humanity as a natural history of the planet. It asks, “Will ours be a Medean or Gaian future?”, referring to diverging hypotheses named for Greek goddesses, one destructive and the other life-giving.
The title of John Michael Greer’s The Wealth of Nature: Economics as if Survival Mattered contains references to two very different economic works: Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. He calls on both books in his attempt to demonstrate that contemporary economics has gone […]
The underlying message in Julie Hill’s book, The Secret Life of Stuff: A Manual for a New Material World, is one of conscious simplification. Not one to slap the wrists of consumers, she professes a love of shopping and the joy she gets from the perfect “find” for pennies. She does, […]
If the world as you knew it was going to end in 21 days, what would you do? Find shelter, locate a water supply or possibly pull out your SKS assault rifle? Wendy Brown’s Surviving the Apocalypse in the Suburbs takes readers through day-by-day preparations in order to live comfortably after an […]
In Recovering a Lost River: Removing Dams, Rewilding Salmon, Revitalizing Communities, author Steven Hawley leads readers on a meandering journey up the Snake River – dropping in on the communities it threads through – to its wilderness headwaters in Idaho. The largest tributary of the Columbia River, the Snake was once […]
The trust inherent in a community’s relationship with its water utility is profound and often unquestioned. That is, until a rash of illness opens the floodgate to doubt. In The Epidemic: A Collision of Power, Privilege, and Public Health, author David DeKok reconstructs a deadly typhoid epidemic in Ithaca, New York, […]
A baby innocently enters the world unaware that it has been the victim of a quiet assault from toxins since conception. Exposed in vitro as a result of its mother’s contact with polluted water and clothing, as well as cleaning and healthcare products, an infant is then subjected to more […]
