Two of British Columbia’s most iconic species, chinook salmon and southern resident killer whales, are in trouble. The whale depends on the salmon for survival. Is it time to manage chinook fisheries with killer whales in mind? In marine ecosystems, cause and effect is a challenge. It’s almost impossible to claim with certainty that depletion […]
environment
Posted inNews + Opinion
SCIENCE MATTERS: Nature offers the best defence against flooding
Spring flooding in Canada this year upended lives, inundated city streets and swamped houses, prompting calls for sandbags, seawalls and dikes to save communities. Ontario and Quebec’s April rainfall was double the 30-year average. Thousands of homes in 130 Quebec municipalities stretching from the Ontario border to the Gaspé Peninsula flooded in May. Montreal residents […]
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SCIENCE MATTERS: Bicycling never gets old
Two hundred years ago this month, an environmental and fuel crisis inspired one of our greatest inventions—a device so simple, efficient and useful that it’s turning out to be part of the solution to today’s environmental and fuel crises. As a Treehugger article explains, the eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora in April 1815 spewed so […]
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Liberals get another shot at saving Nova Scotia’s ecology
The Liberals started their re-election campaign promising decisive new actions on environmental policy: Implementing the party’s cap-and-trade proposal, holding another review on forestry and clearcutting, legally protecting our coasts and passing a Biodiversity Act. Now that Stephen McNeil’s government has won a second majority, environmentalists are waiting to see how quickly the Liberals follow up […]
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SCIENCE MATTERS: Protecting oceans is paying off
Do you remember Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak? It turns out wizards aren’t the only ones who can vanish from sight with a special coat. Marine researchers have discovered shrimp-like crustaceans called hyperiids that can hide in the open using internal nanotechnology to cloak themselves in invisibility. That’s just one among many fascinating discoveries to celebrate […]
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SCIENCE MATTERS: World Environment Day reminds us to reconnect with nature
The notion that we must conquer or dominate nature has governed human behaviour for a relatively short period of our 150,000-year history on this 4.5-billion-year-old planet. It’s an understandable impulse. Our intelligence and foresight allowed us to develop complex societies, and gave us a sense of control over our existence in the face of powerful, […]
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SCIENCE MATTERS: Oil and plastic are choking the planet
People who deny that humans are wreaking havoc on the planet’s life-support systems astound me. When confronted with the obvious damage we’re doing to the biosphere—from climate change to water and air pollution to swirling plastic patches in the oceans—some dismiss the reality or employ logical fallacies to discredit the messengers. It’s one thing to […]
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SCIENCE MATTERS: Long work hours don’t work for people or the planet
In 1926, U.S. automaker Henry Ford reduced his employees’ workweek from six eight-hour days to five, with no pay cuts. It’s something workers and labour unions had been calling for, and it followed previous reductions in work schedules that had been as high as 84 to 100 hours over seven days a week. Ford wasn’t […]
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The unsinkable Marlene Brown
Despite the many hurdles and setbacks, she has experienced over the years, Marlene Brown refuses to give up the fight to bring safe drinking water to Harrietsfield. The rural community along the Old Sambro Road has been stuck dealing with the repercussions of an environmental contamination that took place at a construction recycling and disposal […]
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An anaerobic exercise for Halifax’s compost system
Halifax’s biggest university could end up powered by the city’s rotting food scraps. The municipality is looking for a new and improved composting operation, and the possibility it will include an anaerobic digestion system has industry stakeholders excited. The municipality’s current compost system is over-capacity and doesn’t comply with the latest guidelines set by the […]
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Tapped out in Harrietsfield
This March, Nova Scotia Supreme Court justice Timothy Gabriel rejected an appeal from two companies with the catchy names of 3012334 and 3076525 Nova Scotia Ltd—AKA RDM Recycling Ltd. It was the third time the companies had tried, unsuccessfully, to appeal a 2016 Ministerial Order—itself a revised version of a 2010 order—to complete a $10.6-million […]
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SCIENCE MATTERS: Research sheds light on dark corner of B.C.’s oil and gas industry
We’ve long known extracting oil and gas comes with negative consequences, and rapid expansion of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, increases the problems and adds new ones—excessive water use and contamination, earthquakes, destruction of habitat and agricultural lands and methane emissions among them. As fossil fuel reserves become depleted, thanks to our voracious and wasteful habits, […]
