Canada's Environmental Voice
TOM RAND is a cycling venture capitalist and philosophizing engineer. When not hunting clean-tech investments for his VCi Green Funds, Rand advises the public-private MaRS innovation centre in Toronto. He is also a novice hotelier. I met the first-time author on an icy December morning at his new über-green Toronto […]
Online retailers devalue printed books with aggressive pricing. Text piracy threatens publisher profits.Publishing is dying.
IN CORPORATE BOARDROOMS across Canada, businesses are debating the hot topic of how to rebuild consumer trust when it comes to the environment. Dishonest and irresponsible corporate public relations (PR) campaigns have duped citizens so many times that they are increasingly skeptical of the business community’s sincerity when it comes […]
Ethical Oil: The Case for Canada’s Oilsands, Ezra Levant, Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2010, 272 pages. EVERY DAY, bitumen plugs up the economic and political works of Canada with another heavy headline. Thanks to the rapid development of the tar sands, Canadians can now read about dead birds, deformed fish, […]
DAVID SUZUKI is an inveterate storyteller who first cast his spell on me in Toronto’s St. Paul Cathedral in 1989. He, Margaret Atwood, Gordon Lightfoot and others were raising money for the Amazon’s Kaiapo people. Twenty-two years later, I’m still enchanted. In our latest conversation, “The Doc” – as friends […]
OTOMES OF IMPENDING DISASTER, thy time has passed. Canadians are heeding your message and snapping up titles that are more “do” than “doom.” For ecobook sales in 2010, it was the year of home-grown changes. Book buyers- from St. John’s to Victoria reached for handbooks on sustainable eating, guides to […]
A FEW YEARS AGO, a teenaged local led me through a stretch of the Sierra Norte mountains in southern Mexico’s Oaxaca state. My Spanish es malísimo, so I walked quietly beside or behind him, starting from a humble hilltop village, down a narrow dirt road, into the brush and up […]
A WHITE SPIRIT BEAR cub tentatively crosses a mossy log, followed closely by his black sibling. Majestic grey wolves search for salmon from a rocky, seaweed-enveloped shore at low tide. Two orca whales ply the waters at sunset. “They call this the Great Bear Rainforest,” explains Gitga’at first nation member Helen […]
VANDANA SHIVA'S speaking tour hit Waterloo last fall. To audiences across the continent, she exposed the strengthening grip of corporate control on global food systems, and the complicity of Western governments in allowing it to happen. Shiva promotes a re-imagination of the dominant economic, political and socio-cultural systems, into holistic […]
AS THE STORY GOES, the duo behind the Chicken Soup for the Soul empire couldn’t find a publisher when they assembled their first book. But despite Chicken Soup’s winning formula – 112 million books sold in 15 years – the world of book publishing continues to be an enigma.
