Canada's Environmental Voice
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 June, Ontario’s Minister of the Environment stood at the shoreline of Lake Ontario in downtown Toronto to announce the introduction of Bill 100, the Great Lakes Protection Act, 2012. This broad new legislation would allow ministries to better cooperate on conservation initiatives – water quality, wastewater treatment, algae blooms, […]
Alternatives Journal is now A\J – Canada’s Environmental Voice! And when it comes to providing intelligent and informed environmental journalism, we’re bigger, better and bolder than ever. Read the editorial for the hows and whys of A\J’s new image.
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 […]
What will we do when the water runs out? More importantly, how do we develop an ethical relationship with water, nature and ourselves? In Ethical Water, a well-written, provocative and slender book with a strong Canadian focus, these questions are explored by Robert Sandford, the Canadian chair of the UN’s […]
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 […]
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 […]
AN IMPORTANT PART of any student’s education is hands-on experience. In 1968, a rare opportunity to put this maxim into practice materialized as the Experimental Lakes Area (ELA) in northwestern Ontario. Some have referred to it as a summer camp for scientists.
Check out a large-scale version of the map (pdf). EDUCATION FORMS THE BEDROCK of society’s development. Strong correlations exist between education and everything from global health to economic prosperity to gender equality. The more investment in human capital, the greater leaps a society can make.
