Chris Benjamin

Without snow, Em insisted on a green Christmas. She laced her hiking boots, left her family at the city hotel and followed her guidebook’s thumbnail map to the bus station. A wavering finger pointed her to a strip of pavement on the far side of the parking lot. She sat on her daypack reading Aldo […]

Four years ago I sat in a 1980s Norwegian airliner on a runway in Ghana. The second time the power went out I swore if I survived it would be my last flight. Two weeks later, I hopped a super-saver flight from London to Paris. These days I don’t go past Toronto. Every time I […]

“It’s freaking me out,” Steve Bedard says. “It’s too much of a shock to the system.” Bedard is on the board of the Halifax Cycling Coalition and he’s talking about two big wins for cyclists. In the same week, cyclists learned that Nova Scotia has become the first province to initiate a one-metre safety rule—motorists […]

Six years ago, the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design green rating system came to Canada. The program is an international standardized way to assess the lifetime environmental impact of buildings. While no standardized system is flawless (who gets to decide what counts as green; can the same standards really apply everywhere?), LEED forces greenwashers […]

Coyotes are the new bogeymen. They handily scare small children and simple-minded adults. OK, there’s a slight difference. Last year, bogeymen killed zero Nova Scotians. Coyotes didn’t kill any Nova Scotians either, but two coyotes killed one Toronto visitor—Taylor Mitchell—and that’s a tragic, unusual loss. It’s a tragedy for Mitchell and the people who love […]

Before my son was born I was asked what I most wanted for him. “I want him to know who he is and where he belongs,” I said. Maybe that sounds more strict- father wannabe than liberal columnist. But I’ve come to believe that what sociologists call dislocation—essentially the loss of a sense of belonging—is the […]

Driving north from Halifax you’ve probably seen the 40-foot statue of Glooscap. Maybe you’ve seen it and thought, “At last, Tim Hortons, next exit.” In the statue’s shadow, on the outskirts of Truro, not far from the 102, across the road from an RV sales centre amid a business park, lies the Glooscap Heritage Centre. […]

China’s not known as green, but a Canadian expert on Chinese renewable energy says we should watch and learn. It seemed safe to say China has a bad reputation on environment. It has 20 of the world’s most polluted cities. It’s crowded. There was an 11-day traffic jam on the Beijing-Tibet highway. Eleven days! (And […]

Bedford residents are looking down the barrel of two mega-projects that are anti-ecological, anti-community and will do little for culture—unless you consider shopping avant garde. If all goes as planned, the Bedford Basin near the Bedford Highway Sobeys and the western shore of Papermill Lake will be peppered with condos and strip malls. Amenities and […]