Many people who are concerned about the oncoming climate crisis and loss of biodiversity ask the following questions: “What can one person do? What can one community do?” These questions and others are addressed in this…
Read moreUnique non-confrontational forum with candidates Gord Baird (Green), Kelly Darwin (Liberal), John Horgan (NDP) and Tyson Riel Sutherland (Communist) in the Langford-Juan de Fuca riding. October 15, 7 pm via ZOOM.
Read moreNever in history have we found it as important to turn to music as a medium to inspire us to action and hope. We are in the midst of rapid transformation as we deal with the climate crisis, mass disruption of key ecosystems…
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Bear with me, there are plenty of numbers here, but they are vitally important and in essence quite simple, with profound implications for our climate and energy policies, and I have not seen the implications for Canada presented as I do here.
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In his 2016 book The Serengeti Rules, Sean Carroll tells us Charles Elton, the 1920s pioneering ecologist, identified four factors that control animal numbers: predators, pathogens, parasites and food supply. Two weeks ago I likened these to the Bible’s four horsemen of the apocalypse.
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Contemplating an orange-red noon-day sun almost obscured by the smoke clouds roiling in from America, burning to the south, brought vividly to mind The Sheep Look Up by British author John Brunner, an eerily prescient science fiction novel I read almost 50 years ago.
Read moreThree of Canada’s foremost practitioners in reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, Merrell-Ann Phare, Michael Miltenberger, and professional planner, project manager, capacity developer and engagement…
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The BC Supreme Court has denied a stay application filed last month by the Highlands District Community Association (HDCA) to prevent OK Industries Ltd. (OKI) from starting work on a rock quarry in this rural residential community before its day in court.
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The forest defenders blocking road and logging access to Fairy Creek are devastated that it was not included in the government’s announcement of deferrals of forest areas of the province.
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One of the main ways we can help create the change we want to see, is to send letters and call our elected officials. The more people who do this, the better. To simplify this process, we have drafted this letter which we invite you to cut, paste and share by email and on social media by sharing this post.
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Invitation to join a new International Youth Program online with a submission of an expression of art for peace in a special exchange with Japanese students. It can be drawn or painted, photography, computer designs etc. and is open to all age groups.
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According to the Book of Revelation in the New Testament, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are conquest, war, famine and death, while in the Old Testament’s Book of Ezekiel they are sword, famine, wild beasts and pestilence or plague. (Sometimes, apparently, conquest is interpreted as pestilence or plague.)
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Award-winning author and philosopher, Dr. Kathleen Dean Moore, launches Season Two of Creative Solutions for a New World – Climate and Artist Series with an inspiring and creative presentation, entitled The Barns Burnt Down…
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In May, The World Health Organization released its “Manifesto for a healthy and green COVID-19 recovery.” It is in many ways an astonishing document, because it speaks briefly and plainly to the many global problems we face and how we need to respond.
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Following my reflections last week on Jeremy Lent’s ideas about connections, I found myself musing about beginnings and endings – my own, life on Earth and the universe – and the connections they imply. I thought about and partly wrote this column while sitting under the great trees in Heritage Grove in Francis-King Park, feeling both connected to and in awe of nature.
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Learn about how your place works to keep taxes high and takes opportunities away from property owners across the Greater Victoria area. This is the first of four articles on the seemingly bland subject of parking. And yet, parking policy matters to preventing urban sprawl, and making driving not the convention.
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In his 2017 book The Patterning Instinct, Jeremy Lent suggests there are three forms of disconnection that lie at the heart of the global challenges we are creating and that are “inexorably leading human civilization to potential disaster.”
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Tip O’Neill, the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives in the 1980s, famously remarked “all politics is local.” Significant change rarely starts at the top and moves down, mainly because the powerful do very well out of the current situation and seldom have any incentive to change it.
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There are so many unique and nourishing ways you can use your personal gifts to stand up for forests. Over the next few crucial weeks, it’s going to take as many of us as possible to shine a light on the danger these ancient trees are in.
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hile there is some evidence that we are slowly coming to grips with the reality of climate change, there are large and powerful pockets of resistance everywhere. Largely that resistance is rooted in and propagated by the fossil fuel industry and its ancillary industries, such as the automobile industry.
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Some of the key proposals are focused on significant reforms to the present financial system. B.C. should establish a Green Investment Bank of B.C. that would “be used to finance recovery investments that support B.C.’s climate action targets and other goals”.
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Gail O’Riordan, Jon’s long-time wife and life partner, passed away in 2018, and the Climate and the Arts Legacy Series was established to honour her memory. “Gail was passionate about the arts and felt that combining climate stories about how humanity can change course with music and the performing arts would enrich the discussion and motivate people to act differently,”
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et me turn to Guy Dauncey for an alternative that is neither communism nor medieval. Dauncey has been an interesting, thoughtful and — in the best sense — provocative thinker, writer and activist on ecological and social issues in this region for years.
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Last week, I stressed the importance of a stronger regional economy as a means of increasing local self-reliance, given that we live on an Island and that the Covid-19 pandemic has revealed the vulnerability that comes from being very reliant on others — be they food or energy producers or tourists.
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Last week I discussed Prof. Rick Kool’s point that we live on an island — but we don’t act as if we do. Almost all our food, all of our fossil fuels, much of our electricity and much else is imported. The implication is that we should think about how to be more self-reliant.
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One of the many things the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed is the extent to which we have become dependent on all sorts of products — from face masks to food — that come from away, as Newfoundlanders would put it.
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Wildwood is a 77-acre forest nestled on the shores of Quennell Lake in the Ladysmith area of Vancouver Island. The Ecoforestry Institute Society (EIS) is a registered charitable society and the owners and trustees of…
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