Canada's Environmental Voice
AS MEASURED by public fuss, the debate about human origins boils down to whether life on Earth evolved over hundreds of millions of years, or whether an all-powerful prankster deity spent a week creating a world that just looks like a product of evolution. As measured by practical significance, however, […]
We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we use it with love and respect.– Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
LAST JUNE, I returned to Banff National Park after a long absence. It was good to be back. Banff, Canada’s first and most famous national park, is an important part of my home range. My daughter was born in Banff ’s Mineral Springs Hospital, her birth witnessed by a herd […]
BACK IN 1971, the founders of this publication called it Alternatives. Bob Paehlke, who played a big role in the conception, says the idea was to explore better options for a blindly pro-consumption and pro-growth-at-all-costs society in which almost no one was thinking about the long term.
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 […]
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, […]
