Canada's Environmental Voice
In the Southwestern province of Yunnan, the headwaters of China’s three major rivers glide side by side, carving deep, beautiful gorges through the country’s most culturally and biologically diverse regions. The Salween, Mekong and Yangtze rivers are also the subjects of dozens of proposed dams. The largest is the Tiger […]
As its title suggests, this candid documentary is all about crunching numbers. The story focuses on 28 tree planters putting 9.6 million trees in the ground during a single season in High Level, Alberta, fuelled by 700 lbs. of bacon and driven by the promise of $540 per day.
The Maine coast is a wicked scene, as abruptly harsh as it is serene. It is foreboding and kind, majestic and dull. It is here that two young eccentrics chose to retreat – almost totally – in hopes that homesteading on their very own island might afford more than society […]
What will we do when the water runs out? More importantly, how do we develop an ethical relationship with water, nature and ourselves? In Ethical Water, a well-written, provocative and slender book with a strong Canadian focus, these questions are explored by Robert Sandford, the Canadian chair of the UN’s […]
The one-two punch of the auto industry’s collapse and the foreclosure crisis has driven thousands of people out of Detroit, Michigan, over the past decade, leaving boarded-up houses and overgrown lots behind. Some residents have stayed, however, and they want the world to know: theirs is no ghost town.
Disposable products take on a life of momentous proportion in Trashed. The documentary’s first scenes feature narrator Jeremy Irons wandering through a heaping, open garbage dump in Beirut that produces 80 tonnes of waste per day, making it clear that this story is yet another harsh reality check. The world is […]
The environment is a complex system in which changes to one component create long-term impacts. Policymaking, on the other hand, happens on a short-term time scale. Policies are typically introduced as a direct reaction to a perceived problem. Confounding the issue further is the fact that public interest in the […]
While working as CIBC’s Chief Economist for World Markets, Jeff Rubin told the bank’s CEO that he wanted to write a book about how triple-digit oil prices could reverse globalization. All he got in return was “an icy stare” and a warning about the need for legal permission. It was […]
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.
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 […]
