Canada's Environmental Voice
Sometime during the next 100 years or so, the world is going to run out of platinum. If we haven’t found a replacement, production of new jewelry, electrodes, anticancer drugs and turbine engines will all grind to a halt. Also coming to a screeching stop will be production of solar […]
In the aftermath of the 2014 Oscars, this review focuses on one film that was overlooked by the Academy and, to an extent, by popular culture at large. All is Lost tells the story of an aged man (Robert Redford) who finds himself shipwrecked on a solo voyage in the vast […]
The basics of cacao production are fairly straightforward, but a healthy crop requires specific conditions to flourish and balancing all of the contributing factors can get pretty complex. High-quality, rich, aromatic chocolate is produced from proper cultivation techniques that farmers have been sharing for centuries. With 90 per cent of Peru’s cacao production being […]
Chris Hadfield, perhaps the first out-of-this- world rock star, wastes no time before waxing poetic in his book about the bounteous beauty of space and our planet. “The windows of a spaceship casually frame miracles,” he writes in the opening paragraph of his introduction. “Every 92 minutes, another sunrise [because […]
Around the year 2000, I attended a conference organized by the Council of Canadians about the risks associated with genetically modified organisms. At some point during the proceedings, an extraordinary thing happened. One of the speakers, professor Ann Clark (then of Guelph University) rose and said the following: the problem […]
In People of a Feather, filmmaker and ecologist Joel Health takes viewers on an Arctic adventure with time-lapse video footage, underwater photography, and raw scenes of Inuit life to show how environmental changes are impacting the people and wildlife of the Belcher Islands in Canada’s Hudson Bay. The film was […]
Background reading: Asian Carp Alive and Breeding in Lake Erie Tributary A recent study led by the University of Notre Dame and the US Forest Service confirmed that hydrologically separating the Great Lakes from the Mississippi River watershed would be 95 to 100 per cent effective at containing Asian carp.
On my first day in the Arctic, I woke up and discovered I had murdered a loon.
Replacing working fixtures for the sake of getting energy efficient ones is rarely the most sustainable option, because it ignores the energy and resources that go into making them in the first place. But if you’re renovating anyway, it makes sense to purchase energy-saving fixtures over conventional ones.
