All Articles

Looking Like Bateman

2 May, 2012 | Tenille Bonoguore

Image
Behold the simple chickadee. With its black toupee, matching beard and silver jacket of wings, it is a bundle of quick intent. According to famed Canadian artist Robert Bateman, it also has a face to forget.

“A chickadee’s face is like the end of a sock,” he remarks frankly from his studio on Salt Spring Island, BC. “There’s no expression on it.”

Bateman is watching chickadees pull on a bird feeder outside his window as he chats on the phone and paints, an iPad to his left so he can view different photos of the animals he so vividly depicts.

Published in: Art & Media 38.3

The New Normal

17 April, 2012 | Mark Brooks

Image
Enermodal engineering is Canada’s largest consulting firm exclusively dedicated to creating green buildings and communities. The company recently celebrated its 100th LEED-certified building, and its president and founder Stephen Carpenter was named a LEED fellow. He spoke with Alternatives’ podcaster Mark Brooks.

Mark Brooks: What exactly is LEED certification?

Beyond Energy Efficiency

17 April, 2012 | Chris Magwood

Image

Pretend that you are about to build a modest home somewhere in Canada. You’ve made the appropriate arrangements with designers, building officials, contractors and suppliers. The only thing left to do before you start construction is order the 75,000-litre railway tanker full of gasoline that you’ll burn to provide the energy required to build the house.

Bright Ideas Incubator

17 April, 2012 | Brian St. Denis

Image“I’m not the kind of person to say, ‘Look at this great space to share ideas in’,” admits André Roy, Dean of Environment at the University of Waterloo. “But this building is different.”

Great $aves

17 April, 2012 | Peter Love

Modern concerns about energy started with two oil-price shocks in the 1970s, coming to the fore again in the 1980s with the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Then, more recently, we experienced the Deepwater Horizon and Fukushima disasters. Who knows what the future holds?

The response to these episodes largely consisted of trying to clean up the mess and finding replacement energy. Now, however, there is a drive to look for ways to reduce our energy use in the first place through energy conservation and efficiency. With this change in focus have come some inventive means of realizing energy performance gains in cost-effective and business-friendly ways.
Designed by Frank Leng     Social networking icons designed by Rogie King of Komodo Media
This website is best viewed in the latest version of Firefox, Chrome, Safari, or Internet Explorer.