Canada's Environmental Voice
LAST JUNE, I returned to Banff National Park after a long absence. It was good to be back. Banff, Canada’s first and most famous national park, is an important part of my home range. My daughter was born in Banff ’s Mineral Springs Hospital, her birth witnessed by a herd […]
WHEN THE FIRST ISSUE of Alternatives Journal rolled off the presses in 1971, the world was a very different place – politically and technologically. There was a self-conscious political left and the political right was far less ascendant. Computers filled whole rooms and munched on punch cards to obtain information. […]
BACK IN 1971, the founders of this publication called it Alternatives. Bob Paehlke, who played a big role in the conception, says the idea was to explore better options for a blindly pro-consumption and pro-growth-at-all-costs society in which almost no one was thinking about the long term.
A Boeing 777 has approximately 150,000 subsystems, although under ideal conditions only a few hundred are needed. If it crashed, its 400 passengers and flight crew might perish. When Canada’s cod fishery collapsed, it put 40,000 people out of work, devastated a $500-million-per-year industry and killed countless fish. The US […]
Initially intended to celebrate our nation’s spectacular biodiversity in 2010, the UN International Year of Biodiversity, Alternatives Journal could not help but highlight Ottawa’s spectacular failure to value these invaluable ecosystems. At the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity in Nagoya, Japan, Canada may be blocking progress, rather than encouraging it.
Please note, the print copy you receive of this issue may be a black and white reprint. Going to work is so much a part of our lives that sometimes we forget to think about it. This issue of Alternatives will encourage you to reflect on how we spend the […]
Bill Rees says it best, “If you want sustainable cities, folks, they depend on sustainable countryside.” Yet the agricultural and natural lands that surround our urban centres are being systematically paved over and dug up to make way for housing, highways and industrial development.
It’s not that we don’t know how to determine if a project is sustainable. More often it’s that we fail to apply the tests that exist. This issue of Alternatives describes the many ways that we can test the sustainability of a project, a product or a service. It features […]
Editorial: Reversing the Flow This issue of Alternatives focuses on water soft paths. For most people this statement invites the question: What are water soft paths? Though noun and adjective have been reversed, water soft paths share a common heritage with the soft energy paths developed in the 1970s by […]
