If Earth Day really mattered, no one would ever consider putting bounties on coyotes. We would compete with them, fair and square, for the food and space we need. Sometimes we would win and sometimes coyotes would win. Killing off your competition would be taboo, the ultimate offence against fair play. If Earth Day really […]
Chris Benjamin
Posted inNews + Opinion
Transition period
The Living Earth Council wants Truro to be a Transition Town. It’s a new concept with a 40-year backstory. “It came out of permaculture in the ’70s,” Tina Clarke says. She’s an environmental consultant and a certified “Transition Towns Trainer” from Massachusetts. She’ll be in Truro on May 1, giving a two-day workshop on the […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Radical cheap
Some people associate environmentalism with Haight-Ashbury hippies with trust funds and time to kill, but the reality is, big money is bad for the environment. The dropout generation was cluing into that, but the rat race has sucked many of its children back in. Our brand of environmentalism is too often boiled down to more […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Gas tax dodge
Carbon pricing at its simplest: you drive, you pay a tax on your gas. Call it an environmental sin tax. The federal Gas Tax Fund is distributed to the provinces, which pass it on to municipalities for green infrastructure like public transit, sewage treatment, sidewalks and “local roads and bridges.” Wait, what was that last […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
War on Earth
If money talks, what does it say that Canada spends 12 times more on the Department of National Defence than it does on Environment Canada, and 120 times more on defence than it does on climate change mitigation? Last year we spent $18.8 billion on defence, our largest single program expense, more than double what […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
More Jobs Per Green Buck
In October I went to a presentation by a senior economist from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives in British Columbia. He came equipped with a hard drive’s worth of percentages and demographic comparisons. Two of his stats have stayed with me all these months. One: Mining, oil and gas extraction, transportation and manufacturing account […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Wasting away
Canadians waste about 40 percent of the food that enters our homes. The United States chucks nearly half its food away, $100 billion worth a year. Half of that is at home. UK consumers waste about a third of their food. Add in UK grocery store, restaurant, farm and fisher waste and it’s 70 percent. […]
Posted inArts + Music
Penning for a cause
For all the writers who’ve received rejection slips to the effect of “Too political, we don’t do morals, try non-fiction,” there is hope. Fernwood Publishing launched the Beacon Award (beaconaward.ca) for social justice fiction, last week at Outside the Lines. The idea came from Anne Bishop, a community worker and author of several non-fiction books. […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Finding a simple cure for cancer
Inka Milewski raises an issue about method: “The scale at which an observation is made is really important.” When government scientists measured the North Atlantic cod population in the early ’90s, they missed small areas where cod had disappeared. They were looking at too large portions of the ocean—the small collapses were averaged out by […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Is Sable Island national park a natural disaster?
Should Sable Island become a tourist attraction? Earlier this month, federal environment minister Jim Prentice sparked a controversy when he announced the government is considering making the remote island off Nova Scotia’s coast a national park. The idea of herding tourists onto the island raises concerns about putting its fragile ecosystem at risk. Parker Donham of Contrarian.ca, well-known locally as a columnist and commentator, started a “Hands Off Sable Island” Facebook group, which has over 2,000 members. And the national park announcement surprised environmental groups, including the Sable Island Green Horse Society, which is dedicated to educating the public about
Posted inNews + Opinion
Mining Biodiversity
“Our watershed has one of the highest concentrations of biodiversity in the province,” says Raymond Parker, president of the Avon Peninsula Watershed Preservation Society in Hants County. Parker can be certain in his claim because that biodiversity is threatened by a 50-year mining extension by Fundy Gypsum. The environmental assessment confirms the importance of the […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Round and About
It’s so much easier riding through this cursed Windsor-Bayers Road intersection than dealing with those frigging time-delayed, push-button, anti-pedestrian crosswalks. And this intersection didn’t even make the list of Halifax’s seven worst, which my Facebook friends and Twitter followers came up with. Today I’m traversing them all, by bicycle. I walk more than I bike, […]