IS IT JUST my impression, or has there been a spate of nature and environment-related documentaries recently?
Climate Change
Editorial: Resilience for Dummies
OVER CHRISTMAS, I used my recently learned Spanish. Each time I understood a taxi driver or shopkeeper, I felt a great sense of awe. What once seemed to be a jumble of indistinguishable sounds had sub-divided into individual words. It was as if a microscope in my brain were able […]
Chasing Ice
This quietly jarring documentary about National Geographic photographer James Balog’s work explores the challenge of bringing climate change into focus. In search of a seductive, meaningful display of global warming’s impact, Balog realized “the story is in the ice, somehow,” and created the Extreme Ice Survey (extremeicesurvey.org) in 2005.
The Power & The Glory
IT WAS LIKE AN ALTAR CALL. I had just finished a conference presentation on organic agriculture when a tall, hale fellow in his late 30s bounded down to the front of the auditorium. He wanted to tell his story about how organic food had saved his life. He recounted how […]
Editorial: Rethinking Energy
IN THE FIVE YEARS I’ve spent as editor of Alternatives, nothing has been as controversial as the Suncor Energy advertorials that have been running in the magazine. Many of you have taken advantage of the opportunity to read the opinions of Gord Lambert, this tar-sands company’s vice president of sustainability. […]
The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World
Society has always had a weakness for seers and prophets, those who claim the ability to travel mentally to that murky destination called the future and bring back lessons for today. But the next frontier is, of course, an unknowable place. Regardless of how attractive or compelling a vision of […]
Rethinking the Great White North: Race, Nature and the Historical Geographies of Whiteness in Canada
Unlike most academic books, Rethinking the Great White North stirred enough irritation to be attacked by a Globe and Mail columnist. Repeating an old saw, Margaret Wente previously wrote that what makes someone Canadian is having sex in a canoe. Maybe new immigrants should be taught to canoe, Wente said, […]
Industrial Evolution: Local Solutions for a Low Carbon Future
“At some point, someone in America is going to have to make something.” These obvious yet perhaps revolutionary words come from Industrial Evolution, a wonderful new book by Lyle Estill, an entrepreneur, author, and, dare I say, environmental industrialist. The book’s premise reflects something that we all know but generally […]
The Agitator’s Library
With the worldwide explosion of the Occupy movement, and related Indignado protests in Europe, renewed attention has focused on the possibility of a new high water mark in the push for social change. Each of these four books approaches issues of social change from different perspectives, all drawing from a […]
Global Climate Change: A Primer
Have you ever struggled to reconcile difficult questions about climate change? Are you faced with naysayers who claim that the human impact on the biosphere is all a media fabrication or the workings of scheming Birkenstock-wearing extremists? Authored by a father-son team (a professor at Duke University and an attorney […]
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