Article, Nature & Conservation, Zero Waste & Circular Economy
Monday is Earth Day, and the theme this year is Planet vs. Plastics. This is timely, because Tuesday marks the start of a week-long session in Ottawa of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution. So this week, I begin to look at the plastics industry…
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Article, Arts, Community, & Inclusivity, Food & Health
The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto just released a report on another industry that in various ways harms health — gambling. Not only can it be addictive and harmful to health and social wellbeing, its impact is disproportionately experienced by low-income people…
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Article, Arts, Community, & Inclusivity, Food & Health
So far, in examining what the World Health Organization calls the commercial determinants of health, I have been looking at private sector firms that produce products that harm health, such as tobacco, fossil fuels or unhealthy foods.
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Article, Food & Health
In my last three columns, I looked at the health and economic burden of unhealthy diets, the role of large parts of the food industry in producing and marketing an unhealthy diet, and the ways in which our current food system harms the planet.
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Article, Food & Health
Last week, I noted the private sector is the key player in the provision of a healthy diet. But the food industry also makes a great deal of money from the production and marketing of unhealthy food. It is estimated that globally, unhealthy diets account for about 11 million premature deaths annually.
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Article, Food & Health, Nature & Conservation
As far back as 1964, Paul Sears, an eminent American ecologist and former chair of the graduate program in Conservation at Yale University, described ecology as “a subversive subject” and asked “if taken seriously as an instrument for the long-run welfare of mankind…
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Article, Energy, Housing, & Buildings
Last week, I documented the massive impact of the fossil-fuel industry on people and the planet, an impact the industry generally ignores or downplays in its rush to make money and maintain its power, earning it the title of “the new tobacco.”
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Article, Food & Health
Tobacco is the forgotten pandemic in Canada. While much attention has been focused on the opioid overdose crisis, COVID, alcohol use and other popular issues, tobacco use remains, to this day, “the leading preventable cause of premature death in Canada,” according to a July 2023 Health Canada report.
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Article, Food & Health
Indeed, in a wide variety of ways, the private sector is what I called producers of health — they build our homes, grow our food, produce beneficial medicines, create good jobs and provide many other important determinants of health.
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Article, Food & Health
More than a quarter-century ago, I wrote an article called “Caveat Partner” about the problematic aspects of public health creating partnerships with the private sector.
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Article, Arts, Community, & Inclusivity, Nature & Conservation
The end of the year is always a time for reflection, but more so this past year, which has been significant for me in four key ways. First and foremost, I turned 75. That’s three-quarters of a century, and that’s given me pause for thought — I really am getting old!
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Article, Arts, Community, & Inclusivity, Nature & Conservation
It’s that time of year, when Charles Dickens’ story of Ebenezer Scrooge and the Cratchit family is everywhere. But it’s not just a charming story of how a mean old curmudgeon sees the light and becomes a kindly old gent and a generous benefactor to his employee, Bob Cratchit.
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Article, Energy, Housing, & Buildings
This week, I continue this exploration by looking at key recommendations related to buildings. The next main recommendation is: “In addition to energy efficiency and fuel switching we will make greater gains if we reduce the material intensity of our buildings, and ensure they…
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Article, Transportation
Over the past few weeks, I have dug into the details of Saanich’s “four planets” ecological footprint, as calculated by CHRM Consulting, while recognizing this is an underestimate, in that it does not account for our impact on biodiversity or the extent of our…
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Article, Food & Health, Nature & Conservation
While biological wastes and materials going to landfill or recycling are accounted for, “Toxics and pollutants released from the human economy that cannot in any way be absorbed or broken down by biological processes … cannot be directly assigned an Ecological Footprint,” notes the Global Footprint Network.
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Article, Energy, Housing, & Buildings, Nature & Conservation
mportant though the ecological footprint is, the way it is calculated means the estimate that Saanich’s ecological footprint is equivalent to four planets is an underestimate. That is because a lot of different activities — energy use, food growing, materials for buildings, modes of transportation, waste disposal…
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Article, Energy, Housing, & Buildings, Nature & Conservation, Transportation
I looked at our food consumption and associated food waste, which at 24 per cent is the largest share of the ecological footprint (setting aside the 46 per cent of the ecological footprint that is due to the local activities of the provincial and federal governments)…
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Article, Food & Health, Nature & Conservation
As I reported last week, CHRM Consulting has just completed an updated report on the ecological footprint of Saanich, which is available on the District of Saanich website. The report found Saanich’s footprint was equivalent to four planets’ worth…
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Article, Energy, Housing, & Buildings, Nature & Conservation
That should have been been obvious all along, but never more so than since 1972, when two key books — Only One Earth and The Limits to Growth — were published for the First UN Conference on the Environment in Stockholm…
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Article, Arts, Community, & Inclusivity, Energy, Housing, & Buildings, Nature & Conservation
I first came across Joe Brewer’s work some years ago in an article he wrote critiquing the failure of universities to address in a comprehensive manner the complex ecological, social and cultural challenges we face. He began his 2017 article “Why Are Universities Failing Humanity?” with this statement…
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Article, Arts, Community, & Inclusivity, Energy, Housing, & Buildings, Nature & Conservation
I have spent the last couple of months exploring the global polycrisis and the set of responses — great turnarounds — proposed in the Earth For All report. But what, you might reasonably ask, does this all mean for us here in the Greater Victoria region? How can its concepts be translated into local action?
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Article, Arts, Community, & Inclusivity, Energy, Housing, & Buildings
Earth For All is the title of a September 2022 report from the Transformational Economics Commission to the Club of Rome. It is also “an international initiative to accelerate the systems-change we need for an equitable future on a finite planet.”
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Article, Energy, Housing, & Buildings
The fifth great turnaround proposed by the Earth For All (E4A) initiative of the Club of Rome is a complete restructuring of our energy system. But it’s more than that, since energy is so bound up in all we do. Energy has powered our civilization ever since we first learned to use fire to warm us, cook and scare off predators.
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Article, Food & Health, Nature & Conservation
The first three of the five “great turnarounds” in the Club of Rome’s “Earth for All” report address different aspects of inequality. But the final two, to which I now turn, are concerned with two of the most fundamental determinants of our health: food and — next week — energy.
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Article, Arts, Community, & Inclusivity
The report’s authors stress the need for improvement in “women’s access to education, economic opportunities and dignified jobs, and all life’s chances that these bring.” The education and empowerment of women and their involvement in the economy, they note, is strongly linked to reduced fertility rates and a reduction in population size.
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Article, Arts, Community, & Inclusivity, Energy, Housing, & Buildings
In the past few weeks, I have been stressing the need for a rapid transformation of our society if we are to ensure people around the world can have good lives within planetary boundaries. A recent article in a (British) Royal Society journal by Prof. Timothy Lenton, a leading Earth-system scientist…
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Article, Arts, Community, & Inclusivity
Last week I looked at the 1977 Science Council of Canada report “Canada as a Conserver Society.” The report recommended “Canadians as individuals, and their governments, institutions, and industries, begin the transition from a consumer society preoccupied with resource exploitation to a conserver society engaged in more constructive endeavours.”
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Article, Energy, Housing, & Buildings, Nature & Conservation
My recent columns have emphasised that we urgently need a rapid transformation of the major systems that make up society and underpin today’s dominant culture. Not only will this transformation protect the Earth systems we depend upon for our wellbeing, indeed our very survival, it will lead to improved wellbeing and quality of life.
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Article, Nature & Conservation
The polycrisis, according to the UN and Cascade Institute, includes the climate crisis, war, extreme economic inequality, financial system instability, ideological extremism, pernicious social impacts of digitalization, cyber attacks, mounting social and political unrest, large-scale forced migrations and an escalating danger of nuclear war…
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Article, Energy, Housing, & Buildings, Nature & Conservation
A 2009 publication by Johan Rockstrom and his colleagues at the Stockholm Resilience Centre identified a number of key Earth systems fundamental to natural processes and human wellbeing, and “thresholds which, if crossed, could generate unacceptable environmental change” were identified.
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Article, Arts, Community, & Inclusivity, Nature & Conservation
More than a decade ago, a group of Earth system scientists developed the concept of planetary boundaries. They identified a set of a dozen or so Earth systems and proposed thresholds for each system beyond which it was likely that the system’s stability and resilience would be compromised.
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Article, Energy, Housing, & Buildings, Nature & Conservation
On June 12, Bill Blair, federal minister of Emergency Preparedness, said Canada is in the midst of its worst wildfire season in the past 20 years — and it was only mid-June. Then in a June 20 news release, Environment and Climate Change Canada said we can expect “higher-than-normal temperatures [in] most of the country until at least the end of August.”
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Article, Energy, Housing, & Buildings
I don’t know when I first heard the suggestion that robots should pay taxes, but it was some time in the 1970s, and the idea came from Japan. The concept was certainly in the air by the 1980s. Matt Novak, who writes the Paleofuture blog (about “the history of the future”), wrote in 2014 about an article in the March-April 1986 issue of The Futurist magazine.
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Article, Arts, Community, & Inclusivity
There is much discussion about the implications of artificial intelligence (AI) for humanity. Many of its impacts are likely to be good — AI has already helped develop new and better antibiotics — but not all of them, and some may be downright ugly.
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Article, Arts, Community, & Inclusivity, Energy, Housing, & Buildings
We may be economically better off, but we are not much better off in human and social development terms, and we are eating away at the Earth’s life-support systems on which we ultimately depend. Clearly, we need a new economic system, one based on growing all four forms of capital — natural, human, social and produced (or economic) capital — simultaneously.
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Article, Arts, Community, & Inclusivity, Energy, Housing, & Buildings
The mistake is to see capital largely or only in economic terms, either as financial capital (money, stocks and bonds etc.) or as produced capital — the stuff we produce and own, from trinkets to cities. Hence the heavy focus on the economy, on GDP, on economic growth and the price of stocks and shares, on wages and benefits.
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Article, Arts, Community, & Inclusivity, Energy, Housing, & Buildings, Nature & Conservation
Last week I discussed some of the problems that result from our focus on the economy rather than on ecologically sustainable human and social development. This week, I turn to a more in-depth exploration of the impacts of continual economic growth, and in particular the way in which growth, if unchecked, will dramatically increase inequality.
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Article, Arts, Community, & Inclusivity, Energy, Housing, & Buildings, Nature & Conservation
I recently came across an eloquent and powerful passage by Carl Sagan, the famed cosmologist, written in response to an image of Earth taken by Voyager 1 in 1990, from beyond the planet Neptune. The Earth was just a pale blue dot, which inspired the title of his 1994 book from which the following passage is quoted. Sagan wrote: “You see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us…
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Article, Arts, Community, & Inclusivity
In last week’s column, I discussed the findings of the recent report from Earth4All concerning population growth. Judging by several thoughtful and concerned responses from readers, I fear I did not do a great job, so I will revisit the report’s ideas and, I hope, somewhat clarify what is a complex issue and argument.
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Article, Energy, Housing, & Buildings, Nature & Conservation
Whenever I write about the problems of economic growth and our ecological footprint, I get emails asking why I don’t also address population growth. The short answer is that I have, on several occasions. The longer answer, as I wrote in a July 2018 column on this topic, is that the issue is complex, and the solution not just a matter of family planning.
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Article, Energy, Housing, & Buildings, Nature & Conservation
Given that we only have one planet, we need to live within the carrying capacity of the global ecosystem that is Earth. Yet as I noted last week, Canada’s ecological footprint per person is equivalent to using 5.1 planet’s worth of biocapacity and natural resources every year.
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Article, Nature & Conservation
Just a few days ago, Canada overshot its fair share of Earth’s biocapacity and resources, as measured by the ecological footprint in 2018, the latest year for which data is available. By March 13, Canada had already consumed its fair share of the Earth’s bounty for the year. Collectively, humanity passed its 2022 Earth Overshoot Day on July 28.
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Article, Food & Health
Last week, I suggested self-care should be a strategic priority for Canada’s health system. Done well, it can reduce unnecessary demand for professional care while at the same time improving outcomes, empowering patients and enhancing personal and community capacity for caring.
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Article, Food & Health
Courtesy of the Times Colonist Photo: THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck The most important task in creating a health system is to keep people healthy, so they do not need to use the illness-care part of the system. My three most recent columns looked at ways in which we... Read more
Article, Food & Health
Back in the early 1980s, building on the work of others, I came up with the concept of “healthy public policy,” which has since been taken up by the World Health Organization and many national and provincial governments. Canada even has a National Collaborating Centre on Healthy Public Policy.
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Article, Food & Health
The most fundamental determinants of our health are what I and others call the ecological determinants of health: air, water, food, fuel, materials, and other “ecosystem goods and services” we derive from nature. A second major set of determinants are the social factors that enable us to meet our basic needs: healthy food, adequate shelter…
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Article, Food & Health
Having worked as a family physician in primary care, as a public-health physician in health planning and as a medical health officer, as an advisor and consultant on health promotion to the World Health Organization — mainly in Europe — as a medical consultant in population and public health at B.C.’s Ministry of Health…
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Article, Food & Health
There is much wringing of hands these days about the state of the Canadian health care system, as well there should be. But in fact, there is no such thing as a Canadian health-care system, although there is a Canadian way of funding health services. In the 1990s, when I helped organize study tours for Swedish health-system managers to visit Canada…
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Article, Energy, Housing, & Buildings
Fossil-fuel advocate Gwyn Morgan recently provided yet another nonsensical defence of his industry (“Net-zero fantasy has empowered dictators,” Jan. 11). But as Prof. Roland Clift — a past member of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the U.K. Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution — wrote in response…
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Article, Arts, Community, & Inclusivity, Zero Waste & Circular Economy
My recent columns on the need to reduce inequality and social injustice by, among other things, increasing taxes on the rich and introducing or expanding wealth taxes, have elicited responses from some people along the lines of “you advocate stealing from the rich.”
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