What do we want? Evidence-based decision making!When do we want it? After peer review!
Theory
Social Ecologists and Deep Ecologists Face Off
This article is part of A\J’s web series Night School. In celebration of back-to-school time and our Night issue, the A\J web team brought you a series of quick lessons, posted between September 16 to October 11, 2013, covering everything from activism tactics and canning tips to how factory farms breed disease.
Rethinking Resistance
AS THE PUSH FOR TAR SANDS PIPELINES ESCALATES and the legal channels for fighting them become exhausted, some environmentalists are reconsidering the value of civil disobedience, which Sierra Club Canada (SCC) executive director John Bennett describes as “breaking an unjust law or breaking a law to draw attention to an […]
The No-Nonsense Guide to Equality
The political left has been unable to counter the vision of wealth, personal autonomy and traditional values offered by conservative proponents of the free market. To my mind – which admittedly has a left academic bias – we will need a new way of thinking to do so. In this […]
The Right MINDSPACE for Policy Making
SHOULD POLICY MAKERS USE A CHECKLIST when designing public policies? The authors of MINDSPACE think they should.
Web Exclusive: Life Cycle Analysis in Action
We’ve collected a few videos that explain life cycle analysis and how it’s applied – from product design generally to specific examples of paper, hand dryers and cars. We found a mix of animated and lecture-style videos, and even one for the kids! Learn how LCA reveals more ways to […]
Belief is Biased
SOME OF THE MOST important controversies we face today are those with a scientific underpinning – but a public consequence. Anthropogenic climate change, GMOs and nuclear power are among them. The curious feature of these so-called “scientific” controversies is that most members of the public take a stance, pro or […]
Alternatives
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.
Plato’s Revenge: Politics in the Age of Ecology
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 […]
Requiem for a Species
I have a friend I’ll call Dave. An educated, rational and intelligent man, Dave can be counted on for thoughtful, reasoned arguments, except on one issue: climate change. He has read the overwhelming evidence, but Dave remains certain that climate change is a myth. His proof? He has none that […]
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