Environment

Despair. Shock. These were the reactions of workers and residents around Port Hawkesbury when NewPage Corporation announced it was shutting its mill in 2011. The mayor called an emergency council meeting to save the mill. At any cost. His beloved town’s existence was at stake. About 600 mill jobs were gone, and another 400 in […]

This isn’t a column I chose to write. That’s unusual. The only interference The Coast has ever run with my topic selection has been on Earth Day (“ya gotta cover Earth Day, even if you hate the concept”) and Halloween (“we want the whole issue scary!”). Those instances led to some of my favourite columns: […]

Nothing is ever perfect, or done quite how we’d envisioned—especially when government is involved—but after nine years pushing the city to restore the Bloomfield Centre’s former glory, the mountain has moved. On December 11, council approved a Bloomfield redevelopment plan by the highest bidder, Nova Scotia Housing Development Corporation, the provincial government’s affordable housing agency. […]

In the 1980s, acid rain was a wake-up call. The idea that the sky could open up and rain poison on us, and it was our own fault for being energy pigs—it’s mainly caused by sulfur and nitrogen compounds from electricity production, cars and factories—was a shocker. Acid rain’s impacts were obvious. It killed animals […]

J>ust over a month ago, artist Anna Sprague surrounded the boarded-up Morris House with giant white balloons, turning the building itself into a hot air balloon, symbolizing perhaps its journeyman history. And future. On a to-be-determined Sunday in early December, the storied house will be hoisted onto a truck and hauled 4.5 kilometres from Hollis […]

On October 23, the Standing Senate Committee on Fisheries and Oceans made headlines when it recommended the slaughter of 70,000 grey seals over four years in the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence. Senator Fabian Manning, chair of the committee, told a news conference the proposed cull was an “experiment” to see if it would help […]

Nova Scotian Joan Baxter spent decades in Africa reporting for the BBC, CBC, AP and newspapers without acronyms. She’s written four books on the continent. For three years, she’s worked for a bevy of multi-faith organizations, visiting African farms and researching the 21st-century land grab, the biggest since colonialism. She’s now in Sierra Leone, which […]

Sue Goyette, whose outskirts has won three significant poetry prizes this year, exhales pearls of wisdom like they’re commonplace. “I drive my kids crazy with this stuff,” she says when I tell her she speaks in verse. Goyette is an environmental poet. Not to pigeonhole her. By environment I mean our habitat, surroundings, home and […]

Wading through election ideas and question-dodges gives me a migraine quicker than a glass of harbour-solution sludge. I hope this helps you assess the eco-promises of the mayoral candidates. Grades are based on the candidate’s knowledge, understanding, creativity and commitment to sustainability, as demonstrated in their responses to my questionnaire. Tom Martin: B+ Martin has […]

Wind is an intriguing power source that hasn’t lived up to its potential. Too unpredictable. Too much fear of noise, flicker and bird corpses. But a study published in Nature on September 9 indicates that, globally, near-surface winds could give us 20 times our current energy demand, with an environmental impact infinitesimally smaller than our […]

Early August: Ross Soward sits in a room full of bureaucrats from the provincial energy department, regional municipality culture wonks and health authorities. He’s been working with them for months to organize an open street, car-free Sunday based on the weekly cyclovia, held in several Colombian cities since 1976. The Nova Scotian bureaucrats have slowly […]