“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 […]
Environment
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, […]
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Tragedy of the Common
“Picture a pasture open to all.” So wrote Garrett Hardin in his 1968 Science article, “The Tragedy of the Commons.” His thesis was that a shared natural resource, in self-interested human hands, could only be destroyed. It was a thought-provoking article that is still invoked to advocate and justify private ownership. The history of our […]
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Branding the environment
The environmental movement is good at bugging governments until they ban things like uranium mining or cosmetic pesticides. But it has sometimes failed at the more difficult task of bringing mainstream hearts and minds around to its way of thinking. What’s the point of laws most people don’t yet believe in? In the fight for […]
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Nova Scotia’s Biomass mess
It’s just a report, not policy yet, but the Stakeholder Consultation Process for a New Renewable Energy Strategy for Nova Scotia, Final Report, by Dal profs David Wheeler and Michelle Adams, makes some good recommendations. It ambitiously states that 40 percent of our energy can be from renewable sources by 2020. Most notably, the report […]
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Suburban homes proposed for park
If Halifax’s most politically connected developers get their way, land within the city’s proposed Blue Mountain-Birch Cove Lake Wilderness Park will instead get developed as suburban neighbourhoods. The land in question is 500 acres west of the Bicentennial Highway, owned by four groups—Annapolis Group, Armco Capital, Gateway Materials and Sisters of Charity. The largest of […]
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2010 resolution: quit and start over
That was no vacation, it was the holidays: a forced shopping mall feeding frenzy spread over end-of-year overtime and out-the-door queues, visits with family, friends, friends-of-family, family-of-friends, gift-wrap shredding, plastic chucking, meat and sugar binging, gift returns and more cut-rate shopping. No wonder come January we’re ready to swear off every earth plundering bad habit […]
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Green Santa ratings 2009
Ho, ho, et cetera. I’m a big recycler with no qualms about regifting or giving people junk from my basement for Christmas. So: a recycled column idea. I’m serializing last year’s Sustainable Santa. Here are the eco-naughtiest and earthly nicest Nova Scotian individuals and organizations of 2009, according to local environmental activists, entrepreneurs and green […]
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Local activists return from Copenhagen disappointed
Nova Scotian activists return home from the Copenhagen climate conference with one adjective in their hearts: disappointed. Thea Whitman, a Kings County member of the Canadian Youth Delegation, is distressed that so little has resulted from 15 years of conferences. “While the Copenhagen Accord cites a goal of limiting warming to two degrees,” she says, […]
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Dalhousie study gets province powered up
Nova Scotia Power will have to give up control over who gets access to the province’s energy grid, says a government-sponsored report released Tuesday. The province has set a target of 25 percent of electricity coming from renewable sources by 2015. That goal is lauded by environmentalists, but there’s concern that it will either not […]
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Bhutan measures national performance with happiness index
As the environmentalist eyes of the world watch the Copenhagen climate conference, waiting for our leaders to fail us again, something truly hopeful emerges from the foot of the Himalayas, in a country with fewer people than Nova Scotia. Bhutan, which is surrounded by India and China, has been a little-known environmental leader for decades. […]
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Halifax environmentalists prepare for Copenhagen
Haligonians are preparing for the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark next week. The meeting of world leaders is being billed as the last chance for humanity to implement meaningful policies to avert cataclysmic climate change. Lil MacPherson, owner of The Wooden Monkey, leaves Tuesday to attend the conference as an observer with […]