The spirit of competition is a wonderful thing, a magic
ingredient which turns speed-skating with sticks into a game of hockey, pushing
people to lengths they couldn’t otherwise justify and toward milestones we
wouldn’t otherwise notice.
Except...
A few weeks ago, I took to the Bay of Fundy, catching a
boat from Grand Manan Island to our oceanic border with the United States. In
these hotly contested waters can be found a small stretch of land,...
I started birding by accident, intent on spending a
year identifying the trees of Eastern Canada, and instead falling in love with
their feathered residents.
In the space of a couple of weeks, I went from...
I find it exhausting when we declare problems
unsolvable, as though dedicated dollars and engineering haven’t already granted
us the gifts of flight, cell phones and space travel.
By comparison, the things we have yet to...
Carbon dioxide (CO2) comes up a lot these days, in
politics, in media, and increasingly in daily life, a trend I hope continues as
the urgency of global warming overwhelms our inaction, but just how we perceive
this CO2 and...
I probably won’t say anything here you don’t already
know in your bones, but here goes - the banks of the world financing fossil
fuels has been climatically imprudent for some time, and is now officially
immoral.
We often talk in terms of expunging fossil fuels from
our energy diet, which can frame the discussion in a negative and at times
contentious light. More often we should be talking in terms of adding clean
energy, and acknowledge...
There’s a lot to be said about Bill 213, the so-called
Sustainable Development Goals Act which represents our province’s impressive
though imperfect contribution to national efforts on climate change, passed in
late October.
The purpose of the...
In a recent Canadian
Press article, an interviewee blamed “radical environmental groups”
for a downturn in the number of new oil wells being drilled this year across
Canada, and sluggish overall growth for fossil fuels. The quote stuck with me.
My favourite tree is probably the American beech, not
because it’s the tallest or longest lived member of Maritime ecology, but
because it’s beautiful, and comes with a compelling history.
At one time, the majority of...