Canada's Environmental Voice
IN 1982, Joe and Stephanie Mancini settled in Kitchener, Ontario, after a volunteer stint in Tanzania. The small city was faced with crippling unemployment as plant closings across North America wiped out many of the jobs that had supported thriving local economies. The young couple responded strongly to the disrupted […]
Free the river and the salmon come back. It seems so improbable – impossible! – and yet. DamNation captures the relentless beating pulse of thousands of salmon returning against all odds to Washington State’s Elwha River after nearly a century, the year after the removal of the Elwha Dam. It […]
A conversation between two characters highlights the main concerns in Thomas King’s new novel: the destruction of the environment and the stories told about these catastrophes. In response to Gabriel’s list of environmental disasters, Nicholas proclaims, “It’s well and proper to write what must be seen and to speak what […]
There is a longstanding consensus among the ecologically aware and the health conscious that beef is bad. At the site of production, cattle operations are widely understood to be resource-intensive and to have various negative outputs, including biological waste and plenty of carbon. At the site of consumption, we have […]
If recent crises in Ukraine and Gaza are any indication of how our global thirst for energy is destabilizing the world order, then Ezra Levant – author of Groundswell: The Case for Fracking – has got it right. Levant astutely allocates an entire chapter to Russia’s Gazprom in “How the Shale Gas Revolution Weakens […]
A few centuries ago humans ignited a fossil fire, liberating stocks of carbon long-buried in the Earth’s crust. Since then this fire has powered civilization, enabling the extraction of all other minerals. But it is now flickering, its fuel almost exhausted, even as the waste it produced threatens the biosphere. […]
There is a paddleboarder named Norm Hann. In 2010, he stood on his piece of polished wood and paddled through the misty straights in coastal Northwestern British Columbia. His journey took him along the route supertankers will use if the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline is built. Though today the pipeline is still only […]
It seems clear that capitalism as currently practiced contributes to the planet’s destruction but Daniel Tanuro – who calls himself a “qualified agricultural engineer and a Marxist” – wants to go further and argue that capitalism in any form (present or future) would lay waste to nature. The subtitle of […]
Ten minutes now could save you $508.05. That’s the hallucinatory price tag on Amazon for a volume enticingly titled Recent Developments in Trade and the Environment. Its 869 pages – many printed in eye-straining small type – anthologize 33 post-turn-of-the-21st-century scholarly papers on one of the most divisive subjects in […]
For the 100,000 daily commuters who travel on the Don Valley Parkway in to Toronto’s East end, the landscape is likely viewed as a picturesque transportation corridor, if it is noticed at all. Do Torontonians truly understand the valley for all that it has been in the past – a […]
