Pollinator pathway. Bumblebee highway. River of Flowers. Bee Line. These have all described habitat corridors created to help pollinators like bees and butterflies. We can add Butterflyways to the list. Residents of Toronto and Richmond, B.C., recently celebrated official designation of neighbourhood Butterflyways. The David Suzuki Foundation began its Butterflyway Project earlier this year, recruiting […]
Science Matters
Posted inNews + Opinion
SCIENCE MATTERS: Orca survival depends on protecting chinook salmon
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 […]
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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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SCIENCE MATTERS: Trump is a pariah in the face of climate crisis
In withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, U.S. President Donald Trump demonstrated monumental ignorance about climate change and the agreement itself. As Vox energy and climate writer David Roberts noted about Trump’s announcement, “It is a remarkable address, in its own way, in that virtually every passage contains something false or misleading.” From absurd claims that […]
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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: Increased awareness is key to resolving the climate crisis
Most people understand that human-caused climate change is a real and serious threat. True, some still reject the mountains of evidence amassed by scientists from around the world over many decades, and accepted by every legitimate scientific academy and institution. But as the physical evidence builds daily—from increasingly frequent and intense extreme weather events like […]
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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, […]
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SCIENCE MATTERS: The grisly truth about B.C.’s grizzly trophy hunt
Grizzly bears venturing from dens in search of food this spring will face landscapes dominated by mines, roads, pipelines, clearcuts and ever-expanding towns and cities. As in years past, they’ll also face the possibility of painful death at the hands of trophy hunters. British Columbia’s spring bear hunt just opened. Hunters are fanning across the […]
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SCIENCE MATTERS: Marine protected areas are one piece of a complex puzzle
The federal government recently created two marine protected areas in the Pacific region and has committed to increase ocean protection from one percent to 10 by 2020. But will this be enough? Canada has the longest coastline of any nation, but our country doesn’t end at its ocean shores. With a 200-nautical-mile economic zone and […]
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Welcome to the 21st century: Brighter times or a new Dark Age?
If you own a smartphone, you have more computing power at your fingertips than NASA scientists had when they put people on the moon in 1969! And it’s in a small device, unlike the massive hardware the space agency used. Technology moves in leaps and bounds. As someone who grew up before home computers, transoceanic […]
