Canada's Environmental Voice
Warm air meets cold, spurring a rush of rotating air, which gathers speed, churning and whistling one hundred metres into the air. The vortex becomes self-sustaining, feeding itself energy as it whips itself into a deadly frenzy. Now a full tornado, it has sublime destructive ability.
This suite of eight-foot by eight-foot paintings by Ottawa-based painter Stephen Hutchings is a character study of storms, each as distinct as a snowflake. “The Tower” is fierce and concentrated, capturing a tornado column as it violently strikes an idyllic green field. “Gathering Storm” is ominous and foreboding, with its swirl […]
Follow Marine Biologist Carl Safina as he takes viewers around the world to show us how today’s ocean issues are being solved in his PBS series “Saving the Ocean.” You can watch full episodes online at the PBS website. Here at A/J he’s giving us a behind the scenes look at […]
The Commission on Conservation, a Canadian government agency, was established in 1909. It was perhaps the earliest forum for business-conservation cooperation. It was a prescient and often thoughtful organization, producing hundreds of reports. Its objectives were mild-mannered enough, fitting for an era when polite society was inclined to civility and […]
The 13th annual Planet in Focus film film festival in mid-October provided an unbeatable spot to sit and absorb some of the planet’s most pressing ecological stories. And because its 35 screenings and other programming (ranging from industry events to a fabulous Q&A with Ed Burtynsky, Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas […]
Canada largely owes its economic development to natural resources, the vast and (theoretically) sustainable resources like lumber, fish, minerals, agriculture and energy in the form of oil and natural gas. Borrowing liberally from Harold Innis’s iconic The Fur Trade in Canada, hewers of wood and drawers of water we were, […]
Editorial: Back to the Future In the 1970s the Middle East was in crisis and most Canadians thought and talked about energy use, especially after oil prices quadrupled in 1979. Big station wagons and tail-finned behemoths became yesterday’s vehicles. Thirty years later, the Middle East is in a crisis not […]
In the August/September issue of A\J [38:5, In Defence of Science], energy reporter Andrew Nikiforuk wrote a column that rubbed a number of our readers the wrong way. The executive directors of Environmental Defence and the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment responded with a joint letter that picked […]
IN THE COLDEST NIGHT of the season, well below freezing, and the tawny grasses are stiff with frost. Since dawn we’ve been trekking through a shadowy forest of pine and fir, eventually reaching a wide, arched meadow with views extending to the south and west. Ts’yl?os [pronounced, Ts-eye´-los], sacred mountain […]
THEY SIT BEMUSED under the equatorial sun, like the victims of natural catastrophe, an earthquake perhaps, the second shock imminent and inescapable. The young men and women of Nauru. Theirs is the first nation in a hundred years to plummet from “First World” to “Third World” status in a single […]
