Canada's Environmental Voice
“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 […]
Driven by curiosity, artist and filmmaker Shinpei Takeda travelled with a friend along the west coast of Canada, the US and Mexico to visit immigrant survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs and document their gripping, lingering stories of pain, suffering and loss. His documentary begins with a stark […]
THE NIGHT SKY is the biggest idea we know. It’s reality. You can’t run away from it. Pick any historical culture and you’ll find some kind of lore about the sky. The Greeks may have named Orion and his belt, but it is Kulkunbulla to the aboriginal Australians, or Shen […]
Canada has had its share of massive, global-scale industrial development, including the Alberta oil sands and the James Bay Hydroelectric Project. The construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1958 was one of the biggest industrial projects of its time. The US$470-million project, meant to open the Great Lakes to […]
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.
When it comes to high-speed rail in Canada, there is only one statistic that matters: Canada is currently the only G8 country to not have a high-speed rail network. For a dominion founded on a transcontinental railway (an incredible feat of engineering) and featuring a famous passenger train on the […]
I am lucky to live in the heart of the city, where I can walk or bike to work and play, and I’m only a hop and a skip away from a provincial park where I can lose myself in the woods and lakes for days. What I cannot escape […]
Oh, and the night, the night, when the wind full of cosmic spaceGnaws at our faces – R. M. Rilke, Duino Elegies (trans. Leslie P. Gartner) IF WE CONSIDER the phenomenon of solar flares, Rilke’s description of how cosmic winds sometimes blow in our faces is surprisingly true. Atmospheric auroras, the […]
Residents opposing the Pickering airport have come to expect the unexpected. In their 40-plus years of struggle against a development many feel prioritizes business interests over prime agricultural farmland, the story has unfolded in fits and starts. Long periods of inactivity on the part of the federal government are punctuated […]
From the northern lights to light pollution, the Night issue investigates ideas that resonate most deeply in the dark. In this issue, cultural historian Giles Slade looks at the cosmic activity behind the northern lights (which hit the peak of their 11-year cycle this fall) and discovers that North America’s energy […]
