You do not have the right to a healthy environment…
There, I said it. Neither Nova Scotia nor Canada at
large has ever formally recognized your right to clean air, clean water, clean
soil, or any...
The Boreal covers something like 60 per cent of
Canada’s landmass, dominated by spruce, aspen, larch and pine, among others.
It stretches from Alaska to Newfoundland, and houses
the majority of the species which define Canadian...
To recap, I wrote a column last spring expounding on
the climatic consequences of eating meat and dairy, and shamelessly promoted
veganism.
In it I quoted a landmark study published last year in
the journal Science, concluding
that,...
Nature means many things to many people, some of us
drawn to the cascading rhythm of beaches or rocky shorelines, others to the
quiet dignity of ancient forests, others still to public gardens and the
ornateness of urban green space.
Open pen aquaculture has suffered a great many
criticisms these past few decades, but the most damning of all was shared with
me only recently by a thoughtful New Brunswick marine biologist. As she
explained it, the reason open-pen aquaculture...
The Pilikan House is a living lab on the Middleton
campus of the Nova Scotia Community College (NSCC), designed and equipped to
produce as much energy as it in turn consumes, championing what the science
folk call net-zero housing. I...
For years now, members of the conservation community
and even anonymous government employees have expressed to me their worry that
exactly this would happen - that years of lethargy from our provincial
government would result, finally, in their abandoning the...
The Eastern hemlock is a force of nature in Nova
Scotia.
Not only is it among the most common trees in the
province, it’s invariably the oldest. It was routinely ignored by foresters
past and present in...
The remotest island in all of Canada is a 42 kilometre
long sliver of sand gracing our continental shelf, formed 10,000 years ago by
the workings of glaciers. We call her Sable.
To this day, its...
About 370 million years ago, when Nova Scotia was in the act of
mountain building, our planet’s tumultuous crust permitted the escape of two
elements which, to this day, are found concentrated together in our province’s
bedrock.