Environment

I’ve found a bunch of stuff in my attic: a milk bottle cap with “Buy Savings Stamps and Help Smash Hitler” stamped on it, 1950s-era hockey cards for Walter Hergesheimer and Jim Morrison, a baseball card for Angel Scull and a boy’s “hockey diary,” in which he laments he didn’t get to face his “mortal […]

When Emily McMillan started the Atlantic Chapter of the Sierra Club of Canada back in 2000, she didn’t have an office on Barrington Street, she was the only full-time staff member and she didn’t have any volunteers. Basically, she had herself. “Back then, it was just me,” she says. “I think we’ve really become an […]

I went to Bedford to talk to Bob Kerr, a lone citizen-activist fighting Sobeys’ plan to build a gas station in the parking lot of its store at Mill Cove Plaza. But I came away thinking there’s a much bigger issue: our society just can’t seem to structure itself in a rational fashion. Specifically, we’re […]

“Concern about the environment is a core Canadian value,” says Jim Hoggan. “It’s not something that just popped up last year —it runs deep in the Canadian identity. “But people have been bullshitted to for so long, they don’t trust anyone.” A self-described “corporate PR guy” who has represented such firms as A&W, the Northwest […]

It began in March of 2005, when Mayor Kelly proudly posed for a photo op outside city hall. He stood beside a four-stream waste receptacle in Parade Square, the first of its kind in downtown Halifax. Granted, it wasn’t on a sidewalk (too bulky)—but hey, it was a start. That event formally kicked off phase […]

Twice recently I’ve screwed up the coffee thing. You know: the evil paper cup conspiracy. The first time, I neglected to bring my plastic mug with me to meet someone for coffee at the Farmers’ Market—I ended up furtively stealing sips from a paper cup, self-consciously dreading that someone might see Mr. Environmental Columnist chopping […]

Dynamite would be a lot of fun. But probably the demolition experts would insist on something less cathartic: wrecking balls and such. Still, that sucker has to come down. I’m talking about the Cogswell interchange: the tangle of concrete in the heart of downtown Halifax that serves no purpose save to remind us there was […]

When 23-year-old Jacob Deng returned to Duk Padiet, the village in South Sudan where he was born, his older sister Abiol ran from him screaming. Eighteen years earlier, in 1987, the Sudanese government attacked and burned down his village. Jacob, the only male left in his family, escaped, but his family presumed him dead. Now, […]

Nova Scotia is sinking, and, thanks to global warming, the oceans are rising. We here in Halifax, sitting on the edge of both Nova Scotia and the ocean, have a geologist’s word that Nova Scotia sank between 21 and 47 centimetres over the last century, a continuation of a process that’s been going on for […]

David Suzuki and Elizabeth May are in town this week to speak at the Sustainable Campus Conference at King’s College. But I’ll leave it to others to heap praise on the pair or ask whether the environmental calculus really favours generating tonnes of greenhouse gas by flying eco-celebrities around the world to get people excited […]

Nova Scotia’s scandal du jour demonstrates what journalists can do when they set their minds to it. The Ernie Fage saga has generated reams of newsprint, hours of videotape and stoked the investigative instincts of Halifax’s finest news gatherers. And all this great journalism was spawned by a sports reporter’s dented fender. So what do […]