Educational Companion: Ontario’s Protected and Unprotected Water What is a water walk?
Educational Companion: Ontario’s Protected and Unprotected Water What is a water walk?
Did you know that the collective noun for bats is a “cloud”, or that in the first scientific classification of mammals, bats were placed close to humans because, like us, they have two nipples? The book Bat, by Tessa Laird, is full of similar tidbits that you will want to share […]
Twelve kilometres east of Parliament Hill, the Just Food Farm grows a dazzling mix of organic fruits and vegetables including carrots, brussel sprouts and watermelon. Executive director Moe Garahan tells me the 150-acre agricultural operation forms part of the National Capital Commission’s Greenbelt yet it’s squarely within Ottawa city limits. […]
A roving pack of journalists shake off the rain in a squat, one-story federal building in Oak Harbor, Ohio. Hosting us journalists is a troop from the US Department of Agriculture. Beyond working with farmers, most are farmers themselves. But unlike many of their agricultural colleagues, these men embrace the kind […]
There has rarely been a worse time to build pipelines in Canada than now. One wouldn’t surmise this from listening to the business elites of Toronto and Calgary, gung-ho for the newly approved Trans Mountain expansion, Line 3 replacement, and Keystone XL. Yet, economic conditions have changed greatly since the […]
The blooms returned in 2002. Many hoped the toxic sludge of algae that blanketed the western and central basins of Lake Erie was gone for good, yet the volume of smothering plant matter was growing steadily. Summers from 2008 to 2010 were bloom-heavy in the shallowest of the Great Lakes. […]
It’s not every day that a building plan seeks input from an associate professor in community psychology. But then again, this is not an everyday building. For one thing, it has ambitious goals to hit top benchmarks for net-positive commercial construction. The building, with about 115 square feet on three […]
Some day, for reasons big or small, everyone ends up using services at a local hospital. With that in mind, Dr. Doug Dittmer, Medical Director of Rehabilitation at Grand River Hospital in Kitchener, Ontario, began asking, “Why shouldn’t it be the best experience possible?”
Humankind is an inherently social species. Not only do positive relationships reduce stress and feelings of loneliness, but they also result in long-term happiness and good health. A sense of belonging plays an important part in this social phenomenon.
“I’m allergic to coalitions.” That’s what a prominent Canadian environmental leader once told me. It was 2012, and the organization I was working with at the time had broached the idea of uniting several groups in an effort to disrupt the entrenched “jobs versus nature” narrative.