It was the Sobeys bag that broke the camel’s back. A proposal to ban single-use plastic bags in HRM ignited a garbage fight between several city councillors during two hours of heated debate Tuesday. A staff report before council recommended the municipality work with the province to ban the use of shopping bags in all […]
environment
Posted inNews + Opinion
SCIENCE MATTERS: Large dams fail on climate change and Indigenous rights
Brazil has flooded large swaths of the Amazon for hydro dams, despite opposition from Indigenous Peoples, environmentalists and others. The country gets 70 percent of its electricity from hydropower. Brazil’s government had plans to expand development, opening half the Amazon basin to hydro. But a surprising announcement could halt that. In an interview with O […]
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Province says HRM can dump plastics in Nova Scotian landfill
The province is letting Halifax ship its garbage mountain of trash bags to another Nova Scotia dump. The department of environment announced the temporary exemption in provincial recycling law on Friday. The change lasts for six months and only applies to the Halifax Regional Municipality’s dumping of plastic shopping bags and the plastic wrap around […]
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SCIENCE MATTERS: We ignore urgent global warnings at our peril
A year ago, we revisited the 1992 “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity.” Signed by a majority of Nobel laureates in sciences at the time and more than 1,700 leading scientists worldwide, the document warned, “Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course.” It called for a new ethic that encompasses our responsibility […]
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A very expensive welcome mat
In 1964, when he presented the mill as a “very pleasant” Christmas gift to the province, [Premier] Stanfield neglected to mention what the province was giving Scott for Christmas. As part of the deal, enshrined in the Scott Maritimes Limited Agreement Act of 1965, was the offer from the province to Scott of 230,000 acres […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Here’s to what Halifax is getting right
Most of the news in 2017 has been spent documenting and/or trying to hide from all the horrible garbage fires happening around us. Here, at the end of the year, we instead wanted to raise a glass of kindness to those who are making this city better—the local points of lights in an otherwise abysmally […]
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SCIENCE MATTERS: Shine a light during dark times
Before he died on November 7, 2016, the great poet Leonard Cohen offered a moving, prophetic warning in his final album’s title song: “You want it darker / We kill the flame.” As we near the northern hemisphere’s longest night of the year, it seems like a monumental challenge to keep the flickering flame from […]
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SCIENCE MATTERS: Don’t blame God or nature. We’re the culprits
Traditionally, we’ve labelled events over which we have no influence or control “acts of God” or “natural disasters.” But what’s “natural” about climate-induced disasters today? Scientists call the interval since the Industrial Revolution the “Anthropocene,” a period when our species has become the major factor altering the biological, physical and chemical properties of the planet […]
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Student-led campout put divestment back on the table at Dalhousie
A few days ago I addressed the Dalhousie board of governors on an issue that hasn’t been discussed in that room for three years: fossil fuel divestment. Students made it impossible for the university to ignore the issue any longer by staging a week-long campout on the quad in front of the iconic Henry Hicks […]
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SCIENCE MATTERS: Renewable energy isn’t perfect, but it’s far better than fossil fuels
In their efforts to discredit renewable energy and support continued fossil fuel burning, many anti-environmentalists have circulated a dual image purporting to compare a lithium mine with an oilsands operation. It illustrates the level of dishonesty to which some will stoop to keep us on our current polluting, climate-disrupting path (although in some cases it […]
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Under-mining Nova Scotia’s protected wildernesss
I’m a Haligonian. And like most Haligonians, I’ve had to work pretty darn hard to find a way to stay here. For me, that meant going away for several years to learn new skills and then come home. When employment in my field wasn’t available when I returned, it meant creating my own opportunities. For […]
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Believe in Nova Scotia, not coal-fired billionaires
Last week the owners of the Donkin coal mine in Cape Breton laid off 49 workers, or just over 35 percent of the mine’s workforce. The bad news was delivered to the workers without warning from Kameron Coal, a subsidiary of the Cline Group, which is owned by US billionaire Chris Cline. Although the mine […]
