Canada's Environmental Voice
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?
MOST PEOPLE WOULDN’T buy a car without knowing its fuel economy, or sign up for a cellphone plan without comparing service-provider rates. Yet when it comes to one of life’s biggest investments – purchasing a home – few people question how much it will cost to operate that house over […]
It’s Not About Tupperware I have purchased Alternatives from time to time from my local health food store. I signed up for a subscription when I was at the Guelph Organic Conference in late January. I just received my first magazine, and happy to see all about building green.
Art is powerful. Unlike science, which devotes itself to the refinement of analytical understanding, art has the capacity to go beyond hypothesis and fact to reveal something closer to emotional truth. Art can both explain the world around us, and inspire people to care about it.
RON PORTELLI RECALLS when his university-bound daughter asked him where she should study environmental science. Despite a long environmental career, Portelli was surprised to realize he didn’t know the answer. Such was the separation between universities and the environment industry.
If Herman Daly is the economist for sustainable development, Amory Lovins the physicist and Al Gore the politician, William Ophuls must be the philosopher. Ophuls’ first book on the subject, Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity (1997), placed him among the few scholars of the time (Rifkin and Daly in […]
Like the landscape it aims to preserve, the inherent power of This Soil, This Water comes from returning to and lingering- in its open spaces, nourishing colours and stoic wisdom. Environmental issues and controversies are certainly plentiful in 2012, but few books take aim with such subtle effectiveness, leaving room […]
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 […]
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, […]
When reviewing a book, I mark it up mercilessly. I jot down notable points, create a list of possible quotes and scribble down potential themes that might shape my review. When my lists are long, jumbled and written in my fast, furious – and almost illegible – handwriting, it means […]
