Canada's Environmental Voice
I cannot account for my fascination with whaling. For at least eight years I have studied these historic slaughters with morbid curiosity, sometimes for work, often for pleasure, committing to memory names like Spitsbergen and South Georgia with all the zeal of a WWII buff swotting D-Day and Vimy Ridge. […]
Stepping into old growth has always felt like coming up for air. The vast majority of Maritime forests are young, defined by stifling, low-hanging branches and congested regrowth. White spruce and Red maple grapple and intertwine in pursuit of the sunlight, the air often hot, dry and buggy, their woods […]
Lichens are under no obligation to make sense to us. They number perhaps a million species globally, and while they occur absolutely everywhere – trees, rocks, dirt, dunes, ditches, swamps, ship hulls, manhole covers, brick walls and barn doors – they remain one of the most mysterious and perplexing branches […]
All I ever wanted was a place to plant trees. Since adolescence, the romanticism of shoving seedlings into the ground, then enjoying their shade 30 years later, always appealed to me. The first time I ever indulged this impulse was in the early 2000s, my brother and I paddling the […]
“Move over murder hornets. A new insect has people bugging out,” begins a segment for evening news viewers across the country. The story continues, but most can’t help but pause and question what just came out of their television speakers. Murder hornets? Murder hornet has become the popularized name for […]
(ORIGINAL POSTED APRIL 21, 2021) CAUTION: Serendipitous roads may cause new perspectives It was early March, just before Covid-19 exploded into our collective consciousness. We – my partner and I – decided on a quick weekend getaway to celebrate an anniversary. We live in Kitchener and had wanted to visit […]
This week we are very excited to be reviewing episode four of Cate Blanchett and Danny Kennedy’s new podcast Climate of Change, titled “Rewiring the Future”. Before diving into the review, remember, if you’d like to listen for yourself – head over to Audible.ca! The fourth episode begins with a quote from […]
Dear Reader, Our team at Alternatives Journal is proud to announce the release of our first issue of 2021 (46.1), The Playbook for Progress: A How-to Manual for Making Your World a Better Place. By looking into different silos of green work (government, academia, corporate, eNGO, etc), Playbook for Progress explores just […]
It was the spring of 2016 when I saw my first Atlantic whitefish, an infant, squirming and spasming in the holding tank of a rotary screw trap. It was such an inconspicuous creature, indistinguishable from the myriad minnows of my youth, but I knew better than to take this sighting […]
I’m not sure what woke me – the cold penetrating my sleeping bag, the first impressions of dawn, the internal alarm of the wildlife photographer – but I remember very clearly that it was 5:34am, on Friday, August 27th. Beyond my tent flap flowed the St Lawrence Estuary, as glassy […]
