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 […]
Environment
Posted inNews + Opinion
Groovy garden gathering
This Friday night gives you a chance to hear some great local musicians while supporting community gardening in the city. Bands Ben Caplan and the Casual Smokers, It Kills, Long Long Long and Bad Vibrations will jam while you celebrate local food, take part in a kale-eating competition, bob for radishes—whatever floats your, erm, vegetable. […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Blow job
There are ironies everywhere if you notice them. Like the Dutch windmills on June MacDonald’s yellow tablecloth. MacDonald, a 64-year-old retired school teacher with twinkling eyes and good-humoured determination, has been fighting for more than a year against the installation of windmills near her home in Baileys Brook, Pictou County. But they’re nothing like the […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Energy poverty
In 2007, several Haligonians living on low incomes testified before the Utility and Review Board. They were making the case that energy prices are too high. They couldn’t afford food and heat; it was either/or. These households suffer energy poverty, meaning they pay more than six percent of their incomes on heat and electricity. Environmentalists […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Muzzling Enviro Canada
Pre-Stephen Harper, Environment Canada was regarded as the most accessible, educational federal department. Its scientists were in the media, at conferences, even in classrooms, assessing human impact on the natural world. Now, three reports in as many months have slammed the department for its inaccessibility and lack of accountability. The Climate Action Network, a national […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
How to build a local food system
Food. It’s one of the first things we think of when we wake up. It’s a basic need that trumps love, career, even sex. Two, three times a day, the belly must be filled. Yet, too often, we shove any old hunk of calories down our throats. We eat cheap. “Only nine percent of our […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Catch your share of sustainable fish
Finding fresh seafood is no easy feat in our province, despite being almost entirely surrounded by water. We export over 75 percent of our seafood, and seafood in grocery stores locally has switched hands so many times that it might have been dead for a week by the time it lands on your plate. But […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Alien invasion
“All the earthworms in Atlantic Canada were introduced from Europe,” Christopher Majka, Nova Scotia Museum’s beetle man, tells me. “They have influenced the soil environment but not necessarily in a harmful way. Only a very small percentage of introduced species become invasive.” Majka’s words come faster as he recounts the history of non-human newcomers to […]
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The urban farmer
“You can see the greens thriving, almost ready for harvest,” Elizabeth Peirce says, pointing at her raised beds of arugula and spinach. “These tomatoes are starting to bloom.” She gently fingers the budding yellow flower. “Beauty.” She’s giving me the tour of her Kline Street backyard, one of her three peninsular gardens. She has another, […]
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Sable Island’s cod killer?
One morning in early April 2003, the villagers of Smith Sound, Newfoundland, awoke to a glimpse of what it might have been like to live there 500 years earlier. The sound was brimming with cod, as far as the eye could see. Villagers rushed out in their boats, scooping the fish up in nets and […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Coastal disaster
Developers are hurting Nova Scotia’s coasts and putting homebuyers at serious risk. Jen Graham, the Ecology Action Centre’s coastal coordinator, sends me a slideshow of houses under construction mere feet from the ocean, seaside roads torn up during heavy storms, causeways built for personal access to islands and private-property signs on beautiful beaches, often owned […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Population bomb
In 2007, when I worked for a Ghanaian daily newspaper, I broke a story that 30 percent of the country’s maternal childbirth mortalities were actually botched abortions. Like many women throughout the world, denied access to safe surgical abortions, they resorted to backroom quacks with dubious equipment. They are among the 70,000 women who die […]