‘Good evening. And now, here is the environment news.” Well, that is a daily news segment we won’t be coming across soon — although we should. But we do hear or see the business news on a daily basis, in fact many times a day.
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Kudos to Michael Meagher for this Letter to the Editor in the Nov. 22nd Times Colonist. “Anyone for a tax reduction on properties that contain trees?”
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We are in a climate crisis. Daily we witness or hear about climate disasters all over the world. A recent windstorm in Italy wiped out over a million trees that were 200 years old. Currently in California drought conditions have caused horrific wildfires resulting in a loss of lives, of homes, of trees, plants and wildlife.
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Trees perform important eco-services, such as creating oxygen, cooling the air during our increasingly long, hot summers, reducing storm water, and most importantly, they store carbon. Big trees store a lot more carbon than saplings do. Big trees do more of everything on that list than saplings do.
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Mankind has embarked on a huge, uncontrolled experiment – we have destroyed about 80 per cent of the world’s forests. More are destroyed every minute. How long can we last without them? Instead of waiting to find out, many people are planting thousands, even millions of trees.
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As the Oct. 20 municipal elections loom, I suggest we should be asking all candidates about a very serious issue — in fact, in my view, the most serious challenge we face in the 21st century, both globally and locally: How do we make the changes that move us toward being a One-Planet Region?
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From climate change to local developments, these links contain lots of great information about trees and keeping our forest communities green.
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Here is a healing prayer that considers the universe itself to be the creator. It’s a prayer that both theists and non-theists can be comfortable with. The evolution from a Sufi prayer in 1920 to this version is discussed
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We need to create a societal system that is perfectly designed to enable all the people of the world to live good quality lives within the bounds of the Earth and its ecological systems. What might such a system look like?
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Beyond my 15 years as an M.L.A. and Cabinet Minister, I was a party activist for another 16 years. I am deeply committed to democracy and, on the basis of experience and commitment, I urge British Columbians to affirm the move from our current ‘first past the post’ system to some form of proportional representation.
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The phrase — often shortened to: “Better living through chemistry” — has lodged in the public mind as an unintentionally ironic comment on the sometimes dubious benefits of the chemical industry. This industry is the largest manufacturing sector in the world, according to GreenCentre Canada, which claims that: “Chemistry makes everything we do possible.”
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I wish I didn’t have to write this. I count myself a friend of the NDP/Green Alliance, and I had high hopes for the government’s new climate action plans. BC’s Ministry of Environment has published a series of Clean Growth Intentions Papers, with a deadline for public feedback of August 24th, in the heart of this fire and smoke-filled summer.
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Jim Robbins was incredulous when David Milarch first told him he was cloning ‘champion trees’ because angels had told him to during a near-death experience. “I thought he was joking or spinning a yarn, but he said it all with a straight face,” Robbins said.
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The environment of our buildings, and especially our homes, is enormously important for us. As Sir Winston Churchill remarked: “First we shape our buildings, then they shape us.”
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Thomas Teuwen shares a wealth of information on a variety of topical subject matter from a federal Green Party perspective. We were happy to see Creatively United’s recent Creating a One Planet Region event included.
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The B.C. Healthy Built Environment Alliance was established by the Provincial Health Services Authority in 2007 to provide leadership and action for healthier, more livable communities.
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My recent columns about the ecological crisis we face and the need to reduce our ecological footprint generated emails from several people saying I should address the issue of population growth. They have a good point, but the issue is complex, and the solution is not just a matter of family planning.
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Finding hope can be challenging these days, what with the global ecological crisis, high levels of poverty and inequality, nasty xenophobic and nationalistic politics, and the general failure of governments and societies to respond effectively to these and other challenges of the 21st century.
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The serious issues facing our world – climate change, pollution, ecological degradation, poverty, etc. are global in nature and require a global response. The challenge is how and when the peoples of the world will make this happen.
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The ecological crisis that we are facing is the degradation of life as we know it. Our vary survival is at stake. It raises questions of meaning for us. Who are we, where did we come from and why are we here? These are questions that are central to all religious communities.
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Enjoy a compiled list of films and documentaries related to food issues throughout the world.
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Food security can be described as the state of having reliable access to an adequate quantity of nutritious and affordable food, while food sovereignty is the right of communities to have authority over their own food systems, to produce food that is healthy, culturally appropriate, and ecologically sustainable.
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The ecological footprint measures our impact in terms of the amount of biologically productive land and sea we need to provide the crops and fish we use for food, the grass and feed crops we use for livestock, the timber we use for paper and wood, and the land we need planted in trees to absorb our carbon emissions (“energy land”).
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There is an interesting common thread underlying many of my recent columns. It is the question in the headline: Does mental health matter most?
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The term solastalgia was coined 15 years ago by Glenn Albrecht, an Australian philosopher. He derived it in part from the idea of nostalgia, which means home-sickness. In the 19th and into the 20th century, he wrote, it was considered a medical condition caused by a desire to return to one’s home.
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