Community Stories
Will You Help Put Comfortable, Affordable Homes Within Reach for More Canadians?
A House of Commons petition is calling on the government to make energy efficiency a nation-building priority. We’re asking the federal government to set double the rate at which we improve energy productivity, and to end energy poverty. The benefits of efficiency are…
New Westminster Joins Sue Big Oil
In February, the New Westminster City Council became the 12th BC community to support a proposed class-action lawsuit seeking to recover a share of climate-related costs from global fossil fuel companies. Local residents and young people played a pivotal role in…
Is This the Way the World Ends?
ChatGPT has been all over the media, and none of the news is good. The mother of a Tumbler Ridge shooting victim is suing OpenAI (the mother company) for culpability in the mass killing. And a recent article in The Guardian expressed the deep concern of academics who…
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We Need To Talk About Wildfires (and the Media)
You may have seen the news about devastating wildfires raging in Hawaii right now, with one town (Lahaina) being burnt down almost entirely. With wildfires happening across Canada this summer, displacing people in BC, Alberta and Nova Scotia, it’s hard to not feel…
Transforming Communities with Art: A Toolkit for Educators & Leaders
This Masterclass explores the transformative power of art and how it can create change in your school, community, city, and beyond! Are you struggling to create real impact in the communities you serve? In this free 3-day virtual workshop we will give you the tools…
How To Save Oodles of Precious Water!
Residents throughout BC were recently asked to start conserving water. Bowinn Ma, our new minister of emergency management and climate readiness, said water supply is already extremely low in much of the province. All of Vancouver Island is now at Drought Level 5, the…
We Can’t Afford To Miss The Shift From A Consumer To A Conserver Society
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 ver…
Earth Overshoot Day is August 2nd 2023
What does it mean? What can you do about it? What does it mean? Earth overshoot day is the calculated (world bio capacity divided by world’s ecological footprint) calendar date representing the point in a given year when we’ve used up all of the natural resources that…
A Polycrisis Is Greater Than The Sum Of Its Parts
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 polit…
We Have Already Passed Safe and Just Planetary Boundaries
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 …
Ecological Sanity Must Be Linked to Social Justice
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 resi…
New Proposed Changes to Natural Health Product (NHP) Regulations
Health Canada has proposed a “fee recovery” programme that would make herbal medicines so costly for small to medium sized TCM distributors that they may not be able to sustain their herbal product business, forcing them to drastically reduce their product lines or…
Climate action needs a greater sense of urgency
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 “hi…
Robots Will Have To Pay Taxes
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 fu…
Take Action for Old Growth
As summer is fast approaching, we (Elders for Ancient Trees, Stand.earth, Sierra Club BC, Wilderness Committee) ask for your continued support to keep the pressure on the BC NDP Government to follow through on its promises and work with First Nations to protect…
