Closing the window on Irene

As the remnants of Tropical Storm Irene pounded Montreal this past Sunday, I hunkered down in my apartment. Listening to the winds blow and the rain fall, I thought to myself: “I should really close the living room window, my roommate’s XBox is getting wet.” If you were expecting my rainy day thoughts to be something more profound or at the very least profound-ish sounding and dealing with the nature of nature and its relationship to our very unnatural culture, well, that’s not the case here. And why should it be? Yeah, I had been outside earlier in the day. I had felt slightly stronger-than-usual winds press up against me as I ran some errands. I witnessed the closest thing my neighbourhood got to destruction…

Wasteful Thinking (online doc premiere)

With the world’s population projected to hit seven billion later this year, a stable supply of food has never been more important.

Recent spikes in food prices have set off riots around the world and have been linked to revolutions in the Middle East and the famine devastating the horn of Africa. Even here at home, rising food prices are making people think more about what they eat and where it comes from…

Shale gas industry shoots for social media revamp, critics not convinced

Canada’s shale gas industry is turning to social media for a cure to its tattered public image in Quebec, according to the Canadian Press. The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) has contracted the services of social media company Parta Dialogue to create forumschiste.com, a website billed as a place to discuss issues and share information about shale gas. With the official launch of the website set for Tuesday, one of the industry’s most vocal critics, the Association Québecoise de Lutte Contre la Pollution Atmosphérique (AQLPA) is already calling into question the motives of the effort. “Is this looking at environmental questions or is this damage control?” said Kim Cornelissen of the AQLPA in a phone interview…

Toronto the Green

Before moving to Toronto for the rest of the summer I was warned about the dangers of biking on its streets. I’d need a helmet and some luck, I was told. And I’d heard plenty about newly elected Mayor Rob Ford’s lack of appetite for cyclists and their paths. In fact, the week I arrived, bike paths were making headlines as city council decided to remove bike lanes on Jarvis street they had set up one year earlier. The irony of the decision is that it will cost much more to remove the lanes than it did to install them…

Grain drain: Corn ethanol and a visual tour of Canada’s biofuel industry

With the effects of climate change becoming more pronounced and more dangerous each year, the push for greener fuels is growing around the world. Developers of plant-based fuels called biofuels are doing their best to be the ones to replace gasoline, but not all biofuels are as green as they seem. Some can take nearly as much fossil fuel to produce as they are supposed to replace. Corn ethanol is what is called a first generation biofuel because it is produced from a food grain. This fact has placed it at the centre of the food vs. fuel debate that pits the nutritional needs of people around the world…

Wave of protest: month-long anti-shale gas march crests in Montreal rally

If anyone thought the battle over shale gas in Quebec was finished, a wave of protest that has swept through the province washed those thoughts away in Montreal on Saturday. Organizers and supporters of the “Moratorium for a Generation” marched on the city, bringing to a crescendo a month-long trek from Rimouski in eastern Quebec and along the St-Lawrence River to downtown Montreal outside of…

Malaria in Montreal…it can happen again

When the Montreal General Hospital first opened in 1823, three percent of the first 3665 medical cases treated were for malaria. Yep, malaria…in Montreal.

Our lovely grey city used to be surrounded by a lot more swamp and marshland than it is now. Cases of malaria stretched from here all the way out to the prairies. And we can still get malaria in Montreal; the host of the malaria parasite is the Anopheles mosquito, who lives here, too.

The decrease in Montreal malaria cases happened because…

Flipping off: Germany to abandon nuclear by 2022, activists not satisfied

Despite the fallout from the Fukushima nuclear disaster and renewed fears about the safety of nuclear power, almost no country has taken a position against the controversial energy source, except one. Europe’s economic engine and most populace country, Germany, has bucked the global trend and announced it will shut down all of its nuclear power plants by 2022, at the latest. But ask Jana Wiechmann, Greenpeace coordinator for the northern German city of Bremen, if the battle over nuclear in Germany is won and the answer is simple: no.

When You’ve Got to Go

It wasn’t all that long ago that we needed to use an outhouse to do our business. Even my mom remembers using newspaper instead of toilet paper in the 50s because it wasn’t a common household item at the time. Living in rural Ghana during the summer of 2007 brought me back in time to Montreal’s pre-indoor toilet era. My compound had one communal latrine (a tiny closet of a room with a hole in the ground and…

Achtung! Germany getting greener beyond doors of Klimahaus museum

When Bob Geldof opened the world’s first climate change museum in northern Germany two years ago, he was surprised by two guests, a man from Niger and a man from Samoa whose countries feature prominently in The Journey, the main exhibit at the Klimahaus. Geldof, a well-known human rights activist and music producer, spoke about water, from rising sea levels to desertification, and how these global warming problems will lead to climate migration. People like Foua from Samoa and Ibrahim from Niger would be forced to abandon their homes and homelands because their island is being flooded or there simply isn’t enough water available to survive where their people have lived for centuries…

Crazy Cameroon

Unbiased reporting is very difficult when it comes to the environment. How can one deliver a balanced report when ultra-rich investment corporation ‘X’ forgoes the environmental impact assessment, and goes ahead with project destroy-precious-habitat-for-profit-again? Unfortunately, this is a tale of that exact old story. The happy ending will come from a simple click to share your voice. It’s easy to feel heroic these days.

Das Klimahaus ist gut! World’s first climate change museum gives visitors the 8th degree

They say seeing is believing, but at Germany’s imaginative and revealing climate change museum, they believe experience is even better. Opened in June 2009 in the northern German port city of Bremerhaven, the UNESCO-sponsored museum is the first of its kind. The journey exhibit takes people through a range of the world’s climate zones: mountain glaciers, scorching desert, muggy rainforest and…

Asshole Birds

What do you say about killing another’s baby, replacing it with your own and forcing the parents to cancel out their genetic contribution to the world line in favor of your own. One side is obviously a bunch of dummies, and the other, vindictive jerks taking advantage of maternal niceties…

Even if it were the last election on Earth (Day): politicians ignore the environment, but do Canadians?

Ten days before the election, on April 22, Earth Day gives Canadians and people around the world the chance to focus on the environment. But the question is: does anyone really care? If you follow the election campaign, the answer would be no. The funny thing is that back in 1970, it was a Wisconsin politician, Gaylord Nelson, who started Earth Day. But even though our leaders aren’t talking about it, get back to reality and you’ll find the environment is front and centre. Start at the computer…

What in Tar-nation? Alberta’s Tar Sands at the Dinner Table

We can’t talk about it at the holiday dinner table because one of the kids picked himself up and got himself out of debt by getting a job there. Sure, we’ve touched on it briefly after a couple of mojitos, but when I first learned that my brother-in-law was a mechanic for the larger-than-life trucks that speckle Fort McMurray, Canada’s oil-country, it put a frog in my throat, especially since I used to be heavily associated with Greenpeace, a leading campaigner against the Alberta tar sands. Getting into the pros and cons of the Alberta operation would lead…

Voting for the environment isn’t just for hippies

It’s wonky out there. It’s warm, it’s frigid, it smells like poo, and tulips are trying to push through semi-frozen dirt. In other words, it’s good ‘ol spring weather. The frequency of elections in Canada is almost as reliable as the changing of the seasons, and the parties we have to vote for are warm, frigid, smell like poo, and try to push up through frozen fodder. So who gets your vote?

The CBC has a vote compass tool to check which party most represents your values…