Canada's Environmental Voice
Hundreds of thousands of people in Canada access food bank services every month yet an estimated $27 billion dollars worth of food is wasted in Canada every year. This disturbing social reality is coupled with the negative environmental impact of food waste. When food is wasted, the fresh water that […]
Medicine Hat, Alberta, is branching out. The city has approved a proposal to install the country’s first concentrated solar power (CSP) project. CSP typically employs an array of mirrors to reflect sunlight onto a single point, often at the top of a central tower. The concentrated light quickly becomes heat, […]
YOU JUST TOOK A WATER BALLOON TO THE FACE. The good news is that, as a Canadian, you are rarely so pressed to think about the quality and abundance of your water. Globally, there is enough clean and fresh water for everyone. Nevertheless, huge shortages remain in many parts of […]
Enthused members of the A\J team went to a panel discussion hosted by the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery last week. Featured on stage were Justin Langlois, artist and co-founder of Broken City Lab, Scott Sorli, architect and co-founder of Toronto’s convenience window gallery and Steven Logan, urban researcher and member of the […]
Kapuskasing mayor Alan Spacek is optimistic that an October 18 meeting between Northern Ontario’s mayors and Natural Resources Minister Michael Gravelle will lead to changes in the government’s decision to reduce services in 10 provincial parks. The group presented a report to the minister that compiled park usage data from […]
MANY GRADUATE STUDENTS have helped conduct research at Ontario’s Experimental Lakes Area. The dozen scientists profiled below are broadly representative of at least 47 PhD recipients who completed their degrees using research they participated in at the ELA. In addition, more than 80 master’s theses have been produced from ELA […]
THIS ISSUE of Alternatives Journal came with a steep learning curve. After 41 years of profiling science and sustainability with a strong Canadian perspective, this winter we decided to kick our editorial mandate into higher gear. We chose to set bolder goals, expand our storytelling and play a broader (but still grounded) role […]
Editorial: Waste and the final frontier – A. John Sinclair Working with the Waste Pickers: Asian Approaches to Urban Solid Waste Management – Christine Furedy Pulling in the Same Direction: Private Waste Stewardship and Municipal Waste Management Planning – Robert W. FentonInset: The economics of garbage by John Calvert Restructuring the Economy: A Look […]
The one-two punch of the auto industry’s collapse and the foreclosure crisis has driven thousands of people out of Detroit, Michigan, over the past decade, leaving boarded-up houses and overgrown lots behind. Some residents have stayed, however, and they want the world to know: theirs is no ghost town.
YOU’VE PROBABLY NEVER heard of Fred Cottrell, and that’s a shame. The American sociologist wrote an idea-busting book in 1955, Energy and Society, in which he argued that the availability of energy set and erased the limits of what human beings can do. He revised the essay in 1972, seven years […]
