Backed by a $15.2-million commitment from the federal government, a First Nations community on the west coast of Vancouver Island intends to buy out forestry tenures to stop old-growth logging in selected watersheds around Nootka Sound.
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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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A call to care ever more deeply, widely. To see the interelated critical issues facing the world: Seven young activists who refuse to remain silent and inactive. A call for all of us to support them in their passions.
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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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BC Hydro is planning to remove several hundred trees near Prospect Lake in Saanich in order to upgrade their power transmission lines. Among a number of questions that come to mind, what is Hydro’s relation to the development/real estate lobby?
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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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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…
Read morePlease join us for a very important demonstration in Sidney! ParksCanada is embarking on a $6 million project to kill all the Fallow and native Black-tailed deer on Sidney Island by helicopter and using dogs. This is a cruel and unnecessary cull.
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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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The Wisdom of Tree Symbology, a poem. Living on the plains of hope and dotted throughout the hills, The ancient olive tree is standing oh so still, Its roots have survived over all these years, Bearing fruit that when pressed cries salt free tears, A national tree shared by two feuding nations…
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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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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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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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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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Get the tools you need to use collaborative art to ignite change in your communities! This virtual Masterclass explores the transformative power of art and how it can create change in your school, community, city, and beyond!
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We are an organization of concerned community members and scientists who have recently filed an Action in the Supreme Court of British Columbia to save the Marbled Murrelet (MaMu) and its nesting habitat, Old Growth trees.
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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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Glacier Media is the parent company of the Times Colonist. Both Glacier and the TC are paying members of the UDI development/Real Estate lobby and the TC is an open “Media Partner” with it, which has raised serious questions for many about its independence
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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